A Quick History of PHP

Hypertext preprocessor. Sound familiar? If you’re like me, that makes no sense. However, you probably recognize its acronym: PHP.

Of course, PHP is one of the most popular languages on the web, and the backbone of WordPress and still a part of Facebook (albeit as its own language Hack). With PHP constituting critical parts of the infrastructure of these web juggernauts, the language flows next to HTML and CSS as the lifeblood of the net.

Rasmus Lerdorf wrote the first version of PHP in 1994. The language was built from the C language as a means of replacing the snippets of Perl that he had been using on his personal homepage. However, it wasn’t until 1995 that he released the first formal and public version of the language. At this time PHP referred to Personal Homepage Tools. JavaScript would be released as a client-side language in 1996, so PHP’s release as a server-side language around speaks to the robust growth in the tools of the Internet that occurred during this time.

However, It wasn’t until 1998 when version 3 was released (by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans) that it was renamed to Hypertext Preprocessor. It was this version that gave PHP its substantial popularity. Version 4 of PHP occurred in 2000 and is referred to as the Zend Engine and made PHP a much fuller language. Version 5 was released in 2004 and included new features such as better…