Rasmus Lerdorf created the software that became PHP. According to PHP’s own documented history, in 1994 he wrote a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries in the C programming language, originally to track visits to his online resume. He called the collection “Personal Home Page Tools,” more often referenced as “PHP Tools.”
On June 8, 1995, Lerdorf publicly announced “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0” in a posting to the Usenet group comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi. The announcement described features such as access logging, access counters, password protection, and form handling, and stressed that the tools needed no root access and no separate script interpreter. He released them under the GNU Public License, writing that this meant they were free.
The PHP history notes that Lerdorf followed this with a Forms Interpreter (“FI”) later in 1995 and then a rewrite, and that the two strands were combined into “PHP/FI” in 1996. From these beginnings, the language grew into one of the most widely used server-side scripting tools of the dynamic web.