PHP, or Personal Home Pages, was first created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. It was originally designed to be a simple tool for managing his personal website. However, as more and more people began using it, it quickly evolved into a powerful web development language. In 1995, two developers, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, rewrote the language’s core, adding new features and improving its performance. This version was known as PHP 3 and was released in 1998. It was the first version of PHP to support object-oriented programming, making it easier and more efficient for developers to create complex and dynamic websites. With the release of PHP 4 in 2000, the language gained even more popularity and began to be widely used for creating e-commerce websites and content management systems. This version also introduced the concept of PHP extensions, allowing developers to add new functionalities to the language. In 2004, PHP 5 was released, bringing significant improvements such as better error handling, improved performance, and the introduction of the Zend Engine 2.0. This version solidified PHP as a powerful and versatile language for web development. In 2014, PHP 7 was released, boasting even faster performance and improved memory usage. It also introduced new features such as return type declarations and anonymous classes. Today, PHP is used by millions of developers and powers a large portion of the internet, making it one of the most popular programming languages in the world. Its evolution from a simple personal tool to a robust and widely-used language is a testament to its versatility and adaptability. As technology continues to advance, it is certain that PHP will continue to evolve and remain a powerful tool for web development.