PHP, or Personal Home Page, was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 as a simple tool for tracking visits to his online resume. However, it quickly evolved into a powerful web development language that has played a crucial role in shaping the internet as we know it today. In the early days, PHP was a simple scripting language that allowed for the insertion of dynamic content into static HTML pages. It gained popularity among web developers due to its ease of use and ability to create dynamic and interactive websites. But it wasn’t until 1998 when two developers, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, rewrote the core of PHP and created the PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP). This new version brought significant improvements and expanded the capabilities of PHP, making it a more robust and efficient language. With the release of PHP 4 in 2000, the language became even more popular, thanks to its new object-oriented programming (OOP) features. This allowed for more complex and scalable web applications to be built using PHP. In 2004, PHP 5 was released, which further enhanced the OOP capabilities and added new features like exceptions and improved error handling. By this time, PHP had become the go-to language for web development, powering popular websites like Facebook, Wikipedia, and WordPress. The latest version, PHP 7, was released in 2015 and brought significant performance improvements, making it even faster and more efficient. It also introduced new features like scalar type declarations and anonymous classes. Today, PHP is used by over 78% of all websites, making it one of the most widely used programming languages in the world. Its evolution from a simple personal tool to a powerful language used by millions of developers is a testament to its versatility and continuous development. With its constantly growing community and regular updates, PHP is set to continue evolving and shaping the future of web development.