20th anniversary php

That same day, June 8, 1995, PHP / FI 2.0 was released - the first public release. The author was a Danish programmer Rasmus Lerdorf.

Prior to this, Lerdorf in 1994 created a set of Perl / CGI scripts for outputting and registering visitors to his online resume, processing templates for HTML documents. Lerdorf called the Personal Home Page set.
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In 1997, after a long beta test, the second version of the handler written in C - PHP / FI 2.0 was released. It was used by about 1% (approximately 50 thousand) of all Internet domains in the world.

Now PHP is used in 81.9% of sites around the world.

Version PHP 3.0 has undergone significant processing, which determined the modern look and style of the programming language. In 1997, two Israeli programmers, Andy Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, completely rewritten the interpreter code. PHP 3.0 was officially released in June 1998.

One of the strengths of PHP 3.0 was the ability to extend the kernel with additional modules. Subsequently, the interface for writing extensions attracted many third-party developers working on their modules, which gave PHP the opportunity to work with a huge number of databases, protocols, and support a large number of APIs. A large number of developers led to the rapid development of the language and the rapid growth of its popularity. From this version of the acronym php stands for "PHP: hypertext Preprocessor", instead of the outdated "Personal Home Page".

By the winter of 1998, almost immediately after the official release of PHP 3.0, Andy Gutmans and Zeev Sourasky began processing the PHP core. The tasks included increasing the performance of complex applications and improving the modularity of the PHP code base. The new engine, named Zend Engine, successfully coped with the tasks and was first introduced in mid-1999. PHP 4.0, based on this engine and brought with it a set of additional functions, was officially released in May 2000. In addition to improving performance, PHP 4.0 had several key innovations, such as session support, output buffering, safer ways to handle user input, and several new language constructs.