What prompted the development of ColdFusion?
Back in 1994, I had started a web development consultancy, and was very focused on how the Web could be used for building interactive, community and media based online services. I thought that the Web was an application platform and that you could build open and freely available online services using an open technology such as the Web. I had a lot of ideas for how to build online services, but I was not an engineer and found the existing technologies (Perl/CGI) to be really terrible and difficult. At the same time, my brother was becoming a more sophisticated software engineer, and also became interested in the Web, and he ended up designing the first version of ColdFusion based on the key requirements I had for an online service I was building.