PHP started in the year 1994 and originally stood for personal home page. Initially, it was a set of CGI binaries written in the C programming language, by Rasmus Lerdorf.

Lerdorf created PHP to replace Perl (another programming language) scripts he was using to maintain his website. He would use PHP for tracking visitors, measuring traffic, and putting his resume online.

He had also created a form interpreter which he later integrated with PHP that lead to PHP/FI.

The first public release of PHP was released on June 8th, 1995. Even at such an early stage in it's development, it had the basic functionality that PHP has today.