Filipino Programmer | Philippines

With so many success stories about PHP programming, may it be in web development side or scripting side. Programmers around the world know PHP, but have you ever asked the question about PHP History? Who created PHP and how it started to be one of the most used and successful web development language.

It all started at “Home”

I will share you a little PHP history I have learned since I began using PHP. First what does “PHP” means? Well when Rasmus Lerdorf created the first binaries of what we called PHP today it was used as a small tool to display his personal home page, which is in fact his resume, and to do some certain tasks, such as how much traffic his page was receiving.

PHP Development Timeline

In June 8, 1995 Lerdorf publicly released “Personal Home Page Tools” after Lerdorf combined it with his own Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI (this release is considered PHP version 2). Two Israeli programmers Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans on that time working at Technion IIT, rewrote the parser in 1997 which formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language’s name to what we know now as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. After of months beta test, PHP 3 began and the official launch on June 1998. Soon after that Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP’s core, producing the Zend Engine in 1999. They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel, which actively manages the development of PHP. In May 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, which is one of the two major versions of PHP are being actively developed, PHP 5 which was released on July 13, 2004 by the new Zend Engine II. PHP 4 will be supported by security updates until August 8, 2008. PHP 6 is currently under development, and is slated to release in conjunction with the decommission of PHP 4.

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Remember your IRC days? Have you ever thought who might have created IRC which is one of the most popular chat servers/client today? 1988 was the birth of a new way of communication called IRC (Internet Relay Chat). The developer of this first internet chat network is Jarkko Oikarinen. Born on August 16, 1967, he first wrote the first client/server application when he was working on University of Olulu, Finland. Oikarinen found inspiration in a chat system known as Bitnet Relay, which operated on the BITNET.

When IRC first started regularly hosting users, Oikarinen asked some friends at Tampere University of Technology and Helsinki University of Technology to start running IRC servers to distribute the load. Other universities joined soon after. Markku Järvinen made the client program more usable by including support for Emacs editor commands, and before long IRC was in use across Finland on the Finnish network FUNET, and then on the Scandinavian network NORDUNET.
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In late 90’s web based email service has been increasingly popular. And one of the names that branded Webmail and made history is Hotmail. I still remember how popular Hotmail was, and how people able to communicate very easy and fast using email on browsers. Hotmail was first launched commercially on US Independence Day of 1996, representing the freedom from ISP’s. This was founded by two brilliant minds Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith on 1995. Smith had the idea of incorporating email on web browsers which basically promotes easy access anywhere from a computer. Sabeer came up with the business plan for the mail service and tried all kinds of names that ends with “-mail”. The final name was Hotmail because it included the letters HTML which is the mark up language used to write the base of web pages.
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Among the popular applications used on internet are peer-to-peer type of softwares, such as Napster, eDonkey, winMX, Limewire share their respective popularity. Today, a new breed of p2p method has caught the interest of internet users, the problem with the later p2p methods, distributing large amounts of data requires an original distributor. This posts costing, hardware and bandwidth problems. In early 2001 a new protocol for p2p was designed, this was named BitTorrent (BT).

Data distributed on BT protocol supplies new data to each recipients, reducing the costs on source clients. This provides repeated data outsource thus eventually providing reduced dependence on original distributor.

Bram Cohen, is best known as the author of this popular protocol as well as the first file sharing program to use the protocol. He is also the co-founder of CodeCon, organizer of the San Fransico Bay Area, P2P hackers meeting and co-author of CodeVille.

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I come up with this new category when I watched again one of my favorite movie Italian Job, and decided to dedicate this page on people that had great contribution on the evolution of computing. So here we go, on the movie Italian Job, Seth Green’s character accused the author of Napster of stealing Napster from him while he was taking a nap (Thus the name “Napster”).

This was my favorite part of the movie and made me realize who really did created Napster, as some of you might known, Napster is one of the first and most popular peer-to-peer filesharing platform wayback 1998. And the person who created this application was born in Brockton, Massachusetts and was a computer programmer attending Boston’s Northeastern University.
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