Knowing something about PHP history and about who initially created the PHP language and started the PHP project is interesting information that might help inspire you for developing something of your own. It might also help you to better understand the current state of PHP functionality.
PHP was initially written by Rasmus Lerdorf. It all started in 1994 when Rasmus started working on the very first incarnation of PHP which was a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries written in the C programming language.
- PHP Evolution - Timeline with important milestones of PHP evolution.
- Wikipedia