June 1995 Ordinary builders
The web's most-used language started as one man's personal home page.
June 8: Rasmus Lerdorf releases the first version of PHP, 'Personal Home Page Tools'.
In June 1995 a developer named Rasmus Lerdorf released a small set of tools to run his own homepage and called them exactly that: Personal Home Page. It became PHP, and for years it quietly ran a large share of the internet.
I keep coming back to how it started. Not a boardroom, not a standard, not a strategy. One person solving one annoying problem for himself, in public, and giving it away.
Most of what actually gets built is like this. The grand plans get the press. The tool someone made for themselves gets the traffic.