PHP was created by a Danish/British programmer, Rasmus Lerdorf, in 1995.
While working on a project for the University of Copenhagen's Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Rasmus was looking for a platform-independent scripting language that would be relatively easy to use and free from the licensing fees associated with other languages at the time. In 1994, he began work on a set of Perl scripts that would later become the first release of PHP. The acronym originally stood for Personal Home Page Tools but was changed to the recursive PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor shortly afterward.