PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a popular and widely used programming language for creating dynamic and interactive web pages. Its evolution over the years has been quite remarkable, from its humble beginnings as a Personal Home Page (PHP) tool to becoming a powerful and versatile language for web development. The journey of PHP started in 1994, when Rasmus Lerdorf created a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts to track visitors to his personal website. He named it “Personal Home Page Tools,” which later became known as PHP. In 1995, two developers, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, rewrote the codebase and released PHP version 2.0, which laid the foundation for the language’s evolution. This version introduced a new parser engine, data handling capabilities, and support for forms and cookies. With version 3.0 in 1998, PHP gained widespread popularity as more and more developers started using it for web development. It also introduced support for databases, making it a more robust language for creating dynamic websites. However, it was the release of PHP 4 in 2000 that truly revolutionized the language. It brought in a new object-oriented programming (OOP) model, improved performance, and support for XML. This version marked the beginning of PHP’s transition from a simple scripting language to a fully-fledged programming language. The next major release, PHP 5, came in 2004 and further solidified its position as a powerful web development language. It introduced features like exception handling, improved error reporting, and support for SQLite databases. In 2014, PHP 5.6 was released, followed by PHP 7 in 2015, which brought in significant performance improvements and better support for OOP. The latest version, PHP 8, was released in 2020, and it continues to add more features and improvements, making it a top choice for web development. Today, PHP powers over 78% of all websites on the internet, including popular platforms like WordPress, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Its evolution from a simple personal home page tool to a dynamic and versatile web development language has been truly remarkable and showcases its immense potential for the future.