On June 8, 1995, Rasmus Lerdorf posted an announcement titled “Announce: Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools)” to the Usenet group comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi. The message introduced “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0” and listed features including access logging, real-time log viewing, access counters, domain-based banning, password protection, email-based user tracking, and form handling.
The announcement stressed ease of use: users did not need root access and could install the tools in their public_html directory, and they did not need access to Perl, Tcl, or any other script interpreter. Lerdorf released the tools under the GNU Public License, writing that this meant they were free, and pointed readers to a demonstration on his personal site.
PHP’s own documented history confirms this June 1995 public release as the starting point of the software that grew into the PHP language. The 1995 announcement marks the moment a personal utility for one home page became the seed of a tool that would power a large share of the dynamic web.