PHP History

PHP was conceived sometime in the fall of 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. Early non-released versions were used on his home page to keep track of who was looking at his online resume. The first version used by others was available sometime in early 1995 and was known as the Personal Home Page Tools.

It consisted of a very simplistic parser engine that only understood a few special macros and a number of utilities that were in common use on home pages back then. A guestbook, a counter and some other stuff. The parser was rewritten in mid-1995 and named PHP/FI Version 2. The FI came from another package Rasmus had written which interpreted html form data. He combined the Personal Home Page tools scripts with the Form Interpreter and added mSQL support and PHP/FI was born. PHP/FI grew at an amazing pace and people started contributing code to it.