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The History of PHP

4 bytes added, 20:27, 22 May 2007
The Creation of PHP
The name "Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter" was later shortened to PHP/FI and eventually renamed to represent "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" (the name is said to be recursive because the full name also includes the acronym "PHP" (an odd geeky joke that is common in technology circles when people have trouble naming things. GNU is another recursive name that represents "GNU's Not Unix").
PHP/FI version 1.0 was never really used outside of Rasmus's own web site. With the introduction of PHP/FI 2.0 this began to change. When PHP 3 was released in 1997, adoption of PHP exploded beyond all belief.
== PHP 3 Hits the Big Time ==
By this point PHP has evolved into a scripting langauge that is embedded into HTML pages. When a web page is requested, a pre-processor module interprets the PHP commands embedded in the HTML, performs any necessary tasks and feeds the results to the requesting browser in form that the browser understands. With the introduction of version 2.0 PHP adoption begins to grow.