PHP, or Personal Home Pages, was originally created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf as a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts to track visitors to his online resume. However, it quickly evolved into a server-side scripting language that could be embedded into HTML pages and used to create dynamic web content. This evolution was largely due to the efforts of Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, who rewrote the entire code base and released it as PHP3 in 1998. This new version added more advanced features such as support for databases and improved error handling, making it a more robust and versatile language for web development. As the internet continued to grow and the demand for dynamic web content increased, PHP gained popularity and continued to evolve. In 2000, PHP4 was released with even more advanced features and improved performance, solidifying its position as one of the most widely used web development languages. However, it was the release of PHP5 in 2004 that truly revolutionized the language. This version introduced new object-oriented programming capabilities, making it more efficient and scalable for complex web applications. It also included a new MySQL extension that made it easier to work with databases, further increasing its appeal for web developers. In recent years, PHP has continued to evolve, with regular updates and releases that add new features and improve performance. The most recent version, PHP7, was released in 2015 and boasts significant improvements in speed and memory usage, making it even more powerful and efficient for building dynamic web applications. Today, PHP is used by millions of websites and remains one of the top choices for web development due to its ease of use, versatility, and constant evolution to meet the changing needs of the internet.