The History of PHP

Every once in a while a person faces a particular problem or requirement to which there appears to be no existing solution. Faced with they problem the person decides to create a solution to provide the functionality that they need.

Having developed the solution to their problem it then occurs to them that others may need to solve the same problem, and they decide to make their solution available to others who, in turn, can use and improve on it. Within a short period of time many people adopt the technology and work on it, adding new features they feel will be useful. The solution soon grows beyond expectations in terms of features and adopted by more people than the original creator could ever have imagined.

The history of PHP is just such a story.

The first version of what came to be known as PHP was created in 1995 by a man named Rasmus Lerdof. Rasmus, now an engineer at Yahoo!, needed something to make it easier to create content on his web site, something that would work well with HTML, yet give him power and flexibility beyond what HTML could offer him. Essentially what he needed was an easy way to write scripts that would run on his web server both to create content, and handle data being passed back to the server from the web browser. Using the Perl language, he created some technology that gave him what he needed and decided to call this technology "Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter". The technology provided a convenient way to process web forms and create content.

The name "Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter" was later shortened to PHP/FI and eventually renamed to represent "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" (the name is said to be recursive because the full name also includes the acronym "PHP" (an odd geeky joke that is common in technology circles when people have trouble naming things. GNU is another recursive name that represents "GNU's Not Unix").

PHP/FI version 1.0 was never really used outside of Rasmus's own web site. With the introduction of PHP/FI 2.0 this began to change. When PHP 3 was released in 1997, adoption of PHP exploded beyond all belief.

By the time 1997 arrived the Apache web server had come to dominate the market. If you were hosting a web site, the chances were that you were using Apache to do it.

By this point PHP has evolved into a scripting langauge that is embedded into HTML pages. When a web page is requested, a pre-processor module interprets the PHP commands embedded in the HTML, performs any necessary tasks and feeds the results to the requesting browser in form that the browser understands. With the introduction of version 2.0 PHP adoption begins to grow.