PHP was conceived sometime in the Autumn of 1994. Its manual says that ‘PHP's syntax is borrowed primarily from C. Java and Perl have also influenced the syntax’.

Back in mid-1998, PHP's manual boasted that using ‘a conservative estimate ... PHP is in use on 150000 sites around the world’. Nowadays, their WWW site (http://www.php.net/) cites a Netcraft Survey as saying ‘14,528,748 Domains, 1,328,604 IP Addresses’.

You can download PHP from http://www.php.net/. It is available in source form. You can also get binary versions for Windows 98/Me and Windows NT/2000/XP. Although they do not distribute UNIX/Linux binaries, most Linux distributions come with PHP. Binaries are also available on other WWW sites for AmigaOS, Mac OS X, Novell NetWare, OS/2, RISC OS, SGI IRIX 6.5.x and AS/400.

Instead, you could obtain a software bundle containing Apache's WWW server (httpd), PHP and MySQL (a database server). For example, there are many such bundles for Windows, including EasyPHP, FoxServ, sokkit (which evolved from PHPTriad) and Uniform Server. More details about these products are available at: http://www.easyphp.org/, http://www.foxserv.net/, http://www.sokkit.net/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/miniserver/.