Introduction to Microsoft ASP
by Paul Perrin

ASP is Microsoft's original technology for building dynamic web sites. It is a reliable and established technology used on many websites and intranets.

With Microsoft's introduction of the new .NET technologies (particularly ASP.NET), the original ASP technology (also now referred to as 'classic asp') is gradually being displaced. However there are still many sites being developed using the Classic ASP technology, and this is likely to continue.

Although ASP is an original Microsoft technology and so was originally designed to run on the Microsoft Windows platform, there are now open source implementations that allow classic ASP pages to be run on non-Windows platforms (i.e. Linux) with few limitations.

Typically an ASP pages consist of HTML (the web mark-up language) with VBScript embedded to handle dynamic content - i.e. maybe loading product  information from a database, or saving products to a shopping basket.

The use of VBScript in ASP was an important step towards it popular adoption. VBScript is used as the main scripting language in most of Microsoft's Office products, so there was (and is) a good, established, skills base to call upon for web development.