Uncovering the Fascinating Evolution of PHP: From Humble Beginnings to Dominating the Web
A brief history of PHP from 1995 to 2023
PHP was first introduced on June 8th, 1995, by the Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf. Initially, the acronym stood for Personal Home Page. Originally, he saw it as a thin templating system on top of business logic written in C or a C API for the web.
The impact of early adoption
The world ignored the original vision and started forcing business logic into the templating system, which caused the foundation of PHP to pivot more towards this direction. As it grew in popularity, the original name didn’t make sense anymore so it was rebranded as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.
The community took hold of this new technology and played a major role in how it evolved throughout the years. This growth in adoption was beyond what Rasmus could have anticipated, and today the majority of the web is still driven by PHP, approximately 77.5%.
