PHP 20th Anniversary

On this day, June 8, 1995, PHP / FI 2.0, the first public release, was released. The author was Danish programmer Rasmus Lerdorf.

Prior to this, Lerdorf in 1994 created a set of scripts in Perl / CGI for displaying and registering visitors with his online resume, which processes HTML document templates. Lerdorf called the Personal Home Page set.


In 1997, after a long beta test, the second version of the handler written in C was released - PHP / FI 2.0. It was used by about 1% (approximately 50 thousand) of all Internet domains in the world.

Now PHP is used in 81.9% of sites around the world.

Version PHP 3.0 has undergone significant revision to determine the modern look and style of the programming language. In 1997, two Israeli programmers, Andy Gutmans and Zeev Surasky, completely rewrote the interpreter code. PHP 3.0 was officially released in June 1998.

One of the strengths of PHP 3.0 was the ability to extend the kernel with additional modules. Subsequently, the extension writing interface attracted many third-party developers working on their modules to PHP, which enabled PHP to work with a huge number of databases, protocols, and support a large number of APIs. A large number of developers led to the rapid development of the language and the rapid growth of its popularity. From this version, the acronym php stands for "PHP: hypertext Preprocessor", instead of the obsolete "Personal Home Page".

By the winter of 1998, almost immediately after the official release of PHP 3.0, Andy Gutmans and Zeev Surasky began processing the core of PHP. The tasks included increasing the productivity of complex applications and improving the modularity of the basis of PHP code. The new engine, called the Zend Engine, successfully coped with the tasks and was first introduced in mid-1999. PHP 4.0, based on this engine and brought with it a set of additional features, was officially released in May 2000. In addition to improving performance, PHP 4.0 also had several key innovations, such as session support, output buffering, safer ways to process user input, and several new language constructs.