PHP turns 25!

PHP is 25 years old ?!

On 08 June 1995, Rasmus Lerdorf released version 1.0 of PHP, then called Personal Home Page Tools in a mailing list.

Announcing the Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0.

These tools are a set of small tight cgi binaries written in C. They perform a number of functions including:

• Logging accesses to your pages in your own private log files
• Real-time viewing of log information
• Providing a nice interface to this log information
• Displaying last access information right on your pages
• Full daily and total access counters
• Banning access to users based on their domain
• Password protecting pages based on users' domains
• Tracking accesses based on users' e-mail addresses
• Tracking referring URL's - HTTP_REFERER support
• Performing server-side includes without needing server support for it
• Ability to not log accesses from certain domains (ie. your own)
• Easily create and display forms
• Ability to use form information in following documents

Here is what you don't need to use these tools:

• You do not need root access - install in your ~/public_html dir
• You do not need server-side includes enabled in your server
• You do not need access to Perl or Tcl or any other script interpreter
• You do not need access to the httpd log files

The only requirement for these tools to work is that you have the ability to execute your own cgi programs. Ask your system
administrator if you are not sure what this means.

The tools also allow you to implement a guestbook or any other form that needs to write information and display it to users later in about 2 minutes.

The tools are in the public domain distributed under the GNU Public License. Yes, that means they are free!

For a complete demonstration of these tools, point your browser at: http://www.io.org/~rasmus

-- Rasmus Lerdorf ras...@io.org http://www.io.org/~rasmus

A detailed history of PHP Tools/PHP/FI, and what would eventually be PHP version 3, and is well-written in php.net PHP history page.

If you would like to take a look the source code of some of these older versions, there are preserved at museum.php.net.

Thanks for Rasmus for sharing your work, and all contributors for making the awesome language PHP is today ❤.

[insert your "bUt wE nEeD gEneRicS" comment here].