>easy to get a Linux, MySQL, Apache and PHP

Come on now, it is Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP === LAMP...

it was more than just easy of getting a server going, it over all ease of development, PHP was MUCH easier to work with as a developer than ASP or Perl, or any of the other early web lang's

ASP was about on a par with PHP 3 tbh. PHP probably had the edge because of the array and string handling, but an IIS/ASP web server was easier to set up, and a lot of people could write visual basic.

IIS and ASP was harder to provision programatically. It was all GUI based.

At the time some saw it as an advantage, today everyone agrees that it does not scale

Sure, but we're talking about the time when servers were pets, not cattle.

Lots and Lots of Pets still out there.

Speak for yourself, brother

It is the same set. Personally I used to install it in LMAP order, because Apache and PHP share configuration settings and you want to validate everything end-to-end at the end.