1.1: History of PHP

PHP, which stands for Hypertext Preprocessor, is a server-side scripting language that is widely used for web development. The origins of PHP can be traced back to 1994 when Rasmus Lerdorf, a Danish-Canadian programmer, created a set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts for tracking visitors to his personal website. These scripts, written in C, were later extended and rewritten in C++ by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, leading to the birth of PHP in 1995.

Since then, PHP has evolved from a simple set of CGI scripts to a powerful web development language. The first official release of PHP was version 1.0, which was made available in June 1995. Over the years, PHP has undergone several major revisions, with the latest stable version being PHP 8.1, released in November 2