I started it as an experiment to boost the delivery of static content (my reference examples of that time were things like thttpd). But as soon as other people tried it in production, they immediately requested the proxy component, and the whole “web acceleration” direction had started. In short, NGINX evolved from a simple experiment with the idea of solving the C10k problem, to a complete solution for proxying, load balancing, SSL, static content acceleration, and a few unique capabilities.
—Igor Sysoev, http://bit.ly/nginx_interview
The above excerpt from an interview implies that Nginx never really started ...
