NGINX was first conceived in 2002 by a Russian engineer named Igor Sysoev, with the main aim of solving the C10K problem. The C10K problem refers to the technical challenge of simultaneously managing 10,000 client connections, a task that was difficult for many web servers at the time. NGINX was officially launched in 2004 after two years of intensive development, and was enthusiastically welcomed by the technology community for its ability to handle a large number of simultaneous connections with low memory usage.