Created in autumn of 1994 by a man named Rasmus Lerdorf, the original purpose of PHP may surprise you: it was simply designed to track how much his online resume was viewed. It was called PHP/FI at this time, which stood for "Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter."

In 1997 PHP/FI 2.0 was released, and at its peak accounted for 1% of the total domains of the time with approximately 50,000 installations. At this point it was essentially used by inserting bits of the code in the HTML, with small snippets being used for basic functions such as inserting a username into the page.

It wasn't until shortly after this that PHP as we know it today was born.

In 1997 two men rewrote the main parser, and it was at this point that PHP shifted from being a predominately Lerdorf project to a group oriented effort. Those two men were Audi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski. A lot of changes occurred that lead to the release of PHP 3.0.

For one thing, the /FI part of the name was dropped, and the acronym PHP had a change of meaning, becoming self recursive: PHP: Hypertext Programming. For another, the PHP code itself began to look more like what you'd expect of a programming language, and it became much more useful in the development of true dynamic web pages. After 9 months of public beta, PHP 3.0 was officially released in June of 1998.

PHP 3.0 became the first widely used version of the programming language. Shortly after its release, though, Gutmans and Suraski went in and rewrote the core of PHP, aiming to improve performance of complex applications and the modularity of the language itself. This involved creating a new engine, dubbed the "Zend Engine." PHP 4 was officially released in 2000. At this point, several related projects began to spring up, such as PEAR.

PHP 5 was released in 2004, running on the "Zend Engine 2.0," and has a new object model. It the current version of PHP used today, and is being improved upon by thousands of volunteers around the world.