HIstory of PHP

What is PHP?

PHP is a great scripting language that can be used to create amazing forms, features, and functions on
your website. PHP is a widely used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web
development and can be embedded into HTML. It generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as
its input and creating web pages as output. It can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every
operating system and platform free of charge. PHP is installed on more than 20 million websites and 1
million web servers. The most recent major release of PHP was version 5.2.6 on May 1, 2008.
PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page. It began in 1994 as a set of Common Gateway
Interface binaries written in the C programming language by the Danish/Greenlandic programmer
Rasmus Lerdorf. Lerdorf initially created these Personal Home Page Tools to replace a small set of Perl
scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage.

Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two Israeli developers at the Technion IIT, rewrote the parser in 1997
and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext
Preprocessor.

PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released.
PHP 5 included new features such as improved support for object-oriented programming
In 2008, PHP 5 became the only stable version under development. Late static binding has been
missing from PHP and will be added in version 5.3.
PHP 6 is under development alongside PHP 5. Major changes include the removal of register_globals,
magic quotes, and safe mode.
PHP does not have complete native support for Unicode or multibyte strings; unicode support will be
included in PHP 6.

Major Version Minor Version Release date Notes
1.0 1.0.0 1995-06-08 Officially called "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)". This is the first use of
the name "PHP".
2.0 2.0.0 1996-04-16 Considered by its creator as the "fastest and simplest tool" for creating dynamic
web pages.
3.0 3.0.0 1998-06-06 Development moves from one person to multiple developers. Zeev Suraski and
Andi Gutmans rewrite the base for this version.
4.0 4.0.0 2000-05-22 Added more advanced two-stage parse/execute tag-parsing system called the
Zend engine.
4.1.0 2001-12-10 Introduced 'superglobals' ($_GET, $_POST, $_SESSION, etc.)
4.2.0 2002-04-22 Disabled register_globals by default. Data received over the network is not inserted
directly into the global namespace anymore, closing possible security holes in applications.
4.3.0 2002-12-27 Introduced the CLI, in addition to the CGI.
4.4.0 2005-07-11 Added man pages for phpize and php-config scripts.
4.4.8 2008-01-03 Several security enhancements and bug fixes. Was to be the end of life release for
PHP 4. Security updates only until 2008-08-08, if necessary.
4.4.9 2008-08-07 More security enhancements and bug fixes. The last release of the PHP 4.4 series.
5.0 5.0.0 2004-07-13 Zend Engine II with a new object model.
5.1.0 2005-11-24 Performance improvements with introduction of compiler variables in re-engineered
PHP Engine.
5.2.0 2006-11-02 Enabled the filter extension by default.
5.2.6 2008-05-01 Several security enhancements and bug fixes
5.3.0 Mid Oct'08 Namespace support; Improved XML support through use of XMLReader and
XMLWriter; SOAP support, Late static bindings, Jump label (limited goto), Closures, Native PHP
archives
6.0 6.0.0 No date set Unicode support; removal of ereg extension, 'register_globals', 'magic_quotes' and
'safe_mode'; Alternative PHP Cache; Removal of mime_magic and rewrite of fileinfo() for better
MIME suppor