History of PHP
PHP has a rich history spanning over two decades. It began as a simple tool for personal website tracking and evolved into one of the most widely-used server-side scripting languages on the web.
- 1994: Rasmus Lerdorf created PHP as a set of CGI binaries written in C to track visits to his online resume. It was originally called Personal Home Page Tools.
- 1995: PHP was released to the public as PHP/FI (Forms Interpreter), enabling developers to build dynamic web applications.
- 1997: PHP 3 was released, marking the birth of PHP as we know it. Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser and introduced the name PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
- 2000: PHP 4 introduced the Zend Engine, providing better performance and modularity.
- 2004: PHP 5 added robust Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) support, PDO (PHP Data Objects), and better XML handling.
- 2015: PHP 7 was a major leap in speed and performance, introducing scalar type declarations, return type declarations, and the null coalescing operator.
- 2020: PHP 8 introduced the JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler, union types, and other modern programming features.
- Today: PHP powers over 75% of websites with server-side code, including platforms like WordPress, Magento, and Laravel.


