PHP History

[Prashanth]

PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page.[3] 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. The tools were used to perform tasks such as displaying his résumé and recording how much traffic his page was receiving.[3] He combined these binaries with his Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI, which had more functionality. PHP/FI included a larger implementation for the C programming language and could communicate with databases, enabling the building of simple, dynamic web applications. Lerdorf released PHP publicly on June 8, 1995 to accelerate bug location and improve the code.[7] This release was named PHP version 2 and already had the basic functionality that PHP has today. This included Perl-like variables, form handling, and the ability to embed HTML. The syntax was similar to Perl but was more limited, simpler, and less consistent.[3]
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.[3] The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of beta testing. Afterwards, public testing of PHP 3 began, and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP's core, producing the Zend Engine in 1999.[8] They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel.[3]
On May 22, 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released.[3] On July 13, 2004, PHP 5 was released, powered by the new Zend Engine II.[3] PHP 5 included new features such as improved support for object-oriented programming, the PHP Data Objects extension (which defines a lightweight and consistent interface for accessing databases), and numerous performance enhancements.[9] The most recent update released by The PHP Group is for the older PHP version 4 code branch. As of August, 2008 this branch is up to version 4.4.9. PHP 4 is no longer under development nor will any security updates be released.[10][11]
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.[12][13] PHP 6 is under development alongside PHP 5. Major changes include the removal of register_globals,[14] magic quotes, and safe mode.[10][15]
PHP does not have complete native support for Unicode or multibyte strings;[16] Unicode support will be included in PHP 6.[17] Many high profile open source projects ceased to support PHP 4 in new code as of February 5, 2008, due to the GoPHP5 initiative, provided by a consortium of PHP developers promoting the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5.[18][19]
It runs in both 32-bit and 64-bit environments, but on Windows the only official distribution is 32-bit, requiring Windows 32-bit compatibility mode to be enabled while using IIS in a 64-bit Windows environment. There is a third-party distribution[20] available for 64-bit Windows.

source:wikipedia