I remember back in 2003 when I had a meeting with the then CTO of Amazon for a couple of hours. He was narrating his vision of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), where individual business or programming functions (called services) can be stacked up in libraries and get invoked as and when required. This notion of re-usable services was not new (remember subroutines from the mainframe era or stored procedures from the client-server days?).
Subsequently we called them “web services” because they were loosely coupled applications that can be exposed as services and easily consumed by other applications using Internet standard technologies. Phrases such as XML (EXtensible Markup Language), UDDI (Universal Discovery, Description, Integration), WSDL (Web Services Definition Language), and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) were new lexicons then. These were URL addressable resources that could exchange information and execute processes automatically without human intervention. Oh yes, we talked about how the equivalent of a phone dial-tone is evolving to a personal digital dial-tone (Internet) to an application digital dail-tone (web services).