What Does PHP Stand For?

PHP simply stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, but that was not the original meaning of PHP.  The original meaning, personal home page, grew obsolete and was changed over time.  PHP is a scripting language, and one of the tools used to write web pages. 

PHP was first created in 1995, when the Dot Coms were booming and your parents decided to try “surfing the Internet.” When PHP was first created, the letters in its name represented Personal Home Page, and it has gone through a few “generations” to reach the PHP we know and love today.

Originally, PHP’s creator, Rasmus Lerdorf, set out to design a code to replace a few Perl scripts he was using on his own home page. As Lerdorf required more functionality, he expanded into C, which let his PHP talk to databases and let users create dynamic but simple applications for the Web. 

Lerdorf, wanting to share his creation with everybody else, released his source, as PHP/FI (Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter), for the world to use.  He welcomed people to fix any bugs and even to improve the code so it got better for everybody. 

Development of PHP

PHP/FI led to improved versions of PHP, including PHP/FI 2.0 in November of 1997.  This version of PHP was used by people around the world, with 50,000 domains reportedly using it. 

Like the original PHP, PHP/FI included Perlesque variables, since its roots were in Perl, and allowed users to embed PHP in HTML (hypertext markup language), but big changes were right around the corner.  

PHP 3

Two new minds joined the world of PHP in 1997. Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski created PHP 3 when they discovered the PHP/FI 2.0 lacked the horsepower they needed for some eCommerce work they were developing. 

Gutmans, Suraski, and Lerdorf began working together, making PHP 3 the official version of PHP and the one on which they would build in the future. It was at this point that PHP was no longer known as Personal Home Page, but as PHP: Hypertext Processor. By late 1998, an estimated tens of thousands of people were using PHP, in addition to hundreds of thousands of Web sites.

PHP 4 and 5

PHP 4 was a rewrite of PHP, designed to improve performance and add features. Gutmans and Suraski also created a new engine, called the Zend Engine. PHP 4 is estimated to be used by hundreds of thousands of web developers world-wide, and it reportedly used on several million Web pages. 

PHP 5, released in the summer of 2004, is built on PHP 4, and it features Zend Engine 2.0 along with lots of other great features. Perhaps another version of PHP is looming in the near future. Though nothing is official, we can only suppose that more is in store for PHP. What does PHP stand for? It stands for itself, in more ways that simply the name. This great, open-source code gives the not-at-all free products a run for their money.

PHP went from being one person’s personal code to being used by millions of people around the world. Rasmus Lerdorf’s idea, with important contributions from Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, changed one part of the computing world. It just proves that your good idea could change your part of the world, too.