The History of PHP

PHP started life and is still primarily used as a server-side HTML-embedded scripting language.

PHP, known originally as Personal Home Pages, was first conceived in the autumn of 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. He wrote it as a way to track visitors to his online CV. The first version was released in early 1995, by which time Rasmus had found that by making the project open-source, people would fix his bugs. The first version was very straightforward and had a simple parser which recognised a few special macros and provided some of the utilities which were in common usage on homepages back then.

Two programmers, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, rebuilt PHP's core, releasing the updated result as PHP/FI 2 in 1997. The acronym was formally changed to PHP: HyperText Preprocessor, at this time. (This is an example of a recursive acronym: where the acronym itself is in its own definition.) In 1998, PHP 3 was released, which was the first widely used version.

The latest statistics show that PHP is now in use on over 5.5 million domains, and has had a steady usage growth rate over the past year.