PHP was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. He is still the lead of the PHP group today. It was a template layer for his software that was written in C. He open sourced it and people loved it. More and more functionality was added over the years and the language grew significantly from its original idea.
In the years 1997-1999 two students named Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans re-wrote the core of PHP and released it as version 4. This new core that they wrote was named the Zend Engine. “Zend” comes from their names. This is still the main engine that operates inside PHP today. In 1999 they founded the company Zend technologies. In the years between 2000 and 2010 Zend technologies receives a number of findings from various investors.
Over those years, they are the main contributor to PHP. They call themselves “the PHP company”. Their business model is offering paid PHP products and services to enterprise-class customers while helping and grow the open source PHP community.
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