The evolution of PHP can be traced back to the early 1990s when Rasmus Lerdorf created a set of scripts for his personal website called Personal Home Page Tools or PHP Tools. These tools were designed to help Lerdorf manage his online resume and keep track of how many people were viewing it. As the internet began to grow and more people started creating their own websites, Lerdorf released the code for PHP Tools to the public. This marked the beginning of PHP’s journey from a simple scripting language to a powerful programming language. In the late 1990s, two developers, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, rewrote the original PHP code and created PHP 3, which introduced several new features and significantly improved its performance. With the release of PHP 4 in 2000, the language became even more popular as it added support for object-oriented programming and improved its compatibility with other web technologies. The next major release, PHP 5, brought in even more advanced features such as improved handling of XML and better support for databases. It also introduced the Zend Engine, a powerful scripting engine that greatly enhanced PHP’s performance. In recent years, PHP has continued to evolve and grow in popularity, with the release of PHP 7 in 2015, which brought in significant improvements in speed and memory usage. Today, PHP is one of the most widely used programming languages on the web, powering popular content management systems like WordPress and e-commerce platforms like Magento. Its growth and evolution over the years have cemented its place as a powerful and versatile language for web development.