What was used before APIs became the standard?

Question

I’m not in the IT sector but I’m beginning to understand the logic behind sending requests and receiving responses for various reasons. What was used before APIs became the standard for communication between systems?

Edit: I understand now that I’ve been in fact asking about REST API.

In: Technology

Answer 1

API is such a generic term it is almost meaningless. APIs arent standard, it is any Application Program Interface no matter how it is implemented. Sure a lot of modern web APIs use REST, but take the Windows API, its just actual function calls that the OS provides. All of this gets bundled under the fairly unhelpful term API