PHP, or Personal Home Page, was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf as a simple scripting language for building personal websites. It quickly gained popularity due to its ease of use and compatibility with different operating systems. However, it wasn’t until 1997 when two developers, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, rewrote the entire code base of PHP and released version 3 that it became a powerful programming language. This new version introduced the Zend Engine, which greatly improved the performance and stability of the language. With the release of PHP 4 in 2000, the language became even more robust and gained support for object-oriented programming. This allowed for more complex and scalable web applications to be built using PHP. In 2004, PHP 5 was released with even more advanced features such as built-in support for XML and web services. This further solidified PHP as a serious programming language and not just a tool for building personal websites. Over the years, PHP has continued to evolve and improve, with the latest version, PHP 8, being released in 2020. It now boasts features such as improved type safety and performance enhancements, making it a top choice for building modern and sophisticated web applications. In addition, the widespread use of PHP frameworks like Laravel and Symfony have made it easier for developers to build complex web applications with ease. Today, PHP is used by millions of developers worldwide and powers some of the most popular websites and web applications on the internet. From its humble beginnings as a personal home page tool, PHP has evolved into a powerful and versatile programming language that continues to shape the world of web development.