Maybe? inetd subprocesses on UNIX time sharing systems does look to be the first appearance of what we'd recognize as being serverless, but the timesharing concept was already on its way out in favour of personal computers by that time. It's questionable how much timesharing is responsible for its creation, despite the overlap. It seems more likely that the new age of networked personal computers looking for ways to interact with each other was the major driving force.
Of course, we didn't call it "serverless" back then. If you are referring to the name rather than the technology, I'd credit Ruby on Rails. It is what brought the app server back into fashion, being way too slow for the serverless technologies used before it, and it was that which allowed serverless to also come back into fashion again once developer started getting away from Rails, paving the way for the branding refresh we now know.
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Maybe? inetd subprocesses on UNIX time sharing systems does look to be the first appearance of what we'd recognize as being serverless, but the timesharing concept was already on its way out in favour of personal computers by that time. It's questionable how much timesharing is responsible for its creation, despite the overlap. It seems more likely that the new age of networked personal computers looking for ways to interact with each other was the major driving force.
Of course, we didn't call it "serverless" back then. If you are referring to the name rather than the technology, I'd credit Ruby on Rails. It is what brought the app server back into fashion, being way too slow for the serverless technologies used before it, and it was that which allowed serverless to also come back into fashion again once developer started getting away from Rails, paving the way for the branding refresh we now know.