PHP celebrates 20th anniversary

PHP turns 20 on Monday. Version 1.0 of Personal Home Page Tools, PHP Tools, was released on June 8, 1995. The functions of the scripting language were initially limited. Php was designed in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf, a senior software developer at IBM.

With the announcement and publication of the source code of the ‘homepage tool’ in 1995, PHP took off, even if it was still only a limited set of cgi binaries. Nowadays php no longer stands for Personal Homepage Tools, but for php: Hypertext Preprocessor. This clearly indicates what the language is mainly used for, namely processing information into hypertext. Php was partly derived from Perl, but is most similar to C. The great advantage of PHP is that it is possible to program object-oriented. In the same year as php 1, version 2 was also released, in which the tools were briefly renamed FI or Forms Interpreter. After a complete rewrite of the code, the name was again changed to Personal Home Page Construction Kit.

The scripting interface quickly gained popularity. In 1998, a Netcraft study found that 60,000 domains already had headers containing the term ‘php’. In 1997, two Israeli developers rewrote the parser, forming the basis for PHP 3, and version 3 was officially released in June 1998, laying the foundation for today’s PHP. The two Israelis Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser after version 3. This became the Zend Engine in 1999. The fourth incarnation of the scripting language was released on May 22, 2000 with Zend Engine I.

Php 5 was released on July 13, 2004 with Zend Engine II, but the version remained unstable for a long time. Currently, the most recent stable version of the parser is version 5.6.9, which has been out since May 14, 2015. At the time of writing, the 5.4.x, 5.5.x, and 5.6.x branches coexist. Version 6 of the scripting language will never come out: the goal was to add more native unicode support, but it didn’t work out. Many parts of php 6 were ported back to php 5.3. There has been discussion as to whether the next version should be called 6 or 7, but because the unicode experiment failed, it was decided to skip version 6.

PHP’s mascot is a blue elephant, or elePHPant designed by Vincent Pointier