Well the postmaster looked after sendmail, that being the old word for the man in charge of the post office. The hostmaster looked after DNS because it rhymed, and they needed a word for the guy who looked after the website.

It was a very different meaning from today's "rockstar ninja".

And if you ever ran into an error message on the web you would just contact the webmaster. Problem solved.

Funny. The term is still in use; I think it's usually meant to imply a deeper level of ownership, a la sysadmin. A few times a year people contact me saying they need a webmaster, and the way they describe their needs, I wouldn't say that "developer" really covers it.

To me, the term dev-ops is probably more accurate these days.

and we didn't build a website, we built a homepage.

I thought homepage was just whatever page you had your browser set to start up on. And then some of us built personal home pages that had all the links we cared about on them. And then one of us built Personal Home Pages.

And even if it had CGI, it still wasn't a web app.

Webmaster in a Nutshell [1] was our bible!

[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565923256.do

I think only porn sites use that term these days :D