Programming PHP

A Brief History of PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf first conceived of PHP in 1994, but the PHP that people use today is quite different from the initial version. To understand how PHP got where it is today, it is useful to know the historical evolution of the language. Here’s that story, as told by Rasmus.

The Evolution of PHP

Here is the PHP 1.0 announcement that I posted to the Usenet newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi in June 1995:

From: [e-mail] (Rasmus Lerdorf) Subject: Announce: Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) Date: 1995/06/08 Message-ID: <3r7pgp$[e-mail]>#1/1 organization: none newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi Announcing the Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0. These tools are a set of small tight cgi binaries written in C. They perform a number of functions including: . Logging accesses to your pages in your own private log files . Real-time viewing of log information . Providing a nice interface to this log information . Displaying last access information right on your pages . Full daily and total access counters . Banning access to users based on their domain . Password protecting pages based on users' domains . Tracking accesses ** based on users' e-mail addresses ** . Tracking referring URL's - HTTP_REFERER support . Performing server-side includes without needing server support for it . Ability to not log accesses from certain domains (ie. your own) . Easily create and display forms . Ability to use form information in following ...