PHP is a server-side scripting language for building dynamic web pages. According to PHP’s own documented history, it began in 1994 when Rasmus Lerdorf wrote a set of CGI binaries in C, called “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools),” to track visits to his online resume. He released the source code publicly in June 1995.
The history page records how the tools evolved: a Forms Interpreter (“FI”) in September 1995, a rewrite in October 1995, and then the combined “PHP/FI” in April 1996, which was the first version to make PHP a true programming language. Early PHP let developers embed code directly inside HTML, a model that made it easy to add dynamic behavior to ordinary web pages.
PHP grew into one of the most widely deployed languages of the web era. It became the language behind WordPress and powered the early Facebook codebase, making it a defining tool of the server side of the World Wide Web.