It was an accessible and good enough option, for multiple reasons. The primary of which was the fact that it was built up for the web and was extremely cheap to host.
His post here is arguing about 1981, actually.
>I’ll admit to a soft spot for PHP - I was putting database-driven websites on the web when that wasn’t much of a thing (back in 1981, if foggy memory recalls true). I wrote the asset management system that was used by Lucasfilm on Star Wars, by Manix on the Matrix, by various post-production houses in Soho, etc. etc. - all in PHP. We had video-streaming from remote locations before RealNetworks were mainstream. All because of PHP.
For what it's worth, I started using PHP at Oyster Partners (then Oyster Systems). We did the London Metal Exchange, Swiss Bank, Euromoney and all it's sister magazines. When I joined Oyster, it was 3 people and it ran off a dual-link ISDN line... These days the company has been subsumed into a much larger business worth several million, but Luke still runs that business.
I left Oyster after a couple of years (then 50-strong) to set up my own business in 1998 with an angel investor - the business that Apple eventually bought, and the wayback machine puts us on the web in 2001, which makes sense - we spent a couple of years writing the app before it went public.
The link to the wayback machine site is https://web.archive.org/web/20010501133322/http://www.tea-an...
Your post here is arguing about 1995 or whatever. The post I replied to was full of present-tense about "just use the good parts" and "all languages have issues", etc.