I'm a bit late on this, and I wasn't even aware it was coming up, but apparently today is ColdFusion's 12th birthday. Not bad for a technology that has been on it's death bed for the past few years. (And yes, that's sarcasm in case any ComputerWorld "journalists" are reading.)

My first experience with ColdFusion was around 95 or 96 I believe. I had been doing all my web applications in Perl before that. (I still have a great deal of respect for Perl. I once spent a few months at Netscape where my entire job was working on one Perl script meant to facilitate a web site update.) I had been doing my "database" work in flat text files. (Scary, I know.) The web shop I worked for (Einstein Digital Media) got a client that needed a "real" database, so I picked up ColdFusion (3. something I believe) to see how easy it would be. That was the first time I used ColdFusion, and the last time I used anything else. (Ok, so I did play some with JSPs, ASP, and PHP.)

How about you? What was your first experience with ColdFusion?