PHP, or Personal Home Page, was first developed in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf as a simple scripting language for his personal website. It was originally intended to help him manage his own web pages, but soon gained popularity among other web developers. However, it wasn’t until 1997 when two programmers, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, rewrote the original code and released it as PHP 3 that the language truly began to evolve into a powerful programming language. With the addition of a new language engine, improved support for databases, and the ability to create dynamic web pages, PHP 3 quickly gained traction and became the foundation for future versions. In 2000, PHP 4 was released with even more features and improvements, solidifying its place as one of the most popular server-side scripting languages. But it wasn’t just the technical improvements that contributed to PHP’s success, it was also its open-source nature that allowed for a large community of developers to contribute and continuously improve the language. This led to the release of PHP 5 in 2004, which introduced new object-oriented programming features and made it even more flexible and powerful. In 2012, PHP 5.4 was released with improved performance, and in 2015, PHP 7 was released with significant improvements in speed and memory usage. Today, PHP is used by millions of websites and has become a dominant force in web development, powering popular content management systems like WordPress and Drupal. The evolution of PHP from a simple scripting language to a powerful programming language has been a testament to the dedication and contributions of the community, and it continues to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing landscape of the internet.