diff --git a/appendices/history.xml b/appendices/history.xml
index 577987cd8c..c8103d028a 100644
--- a/appendices/history.xml
+++ b/appendices/history.xml
@@ -1,14 +1,256 @@
-
+
-
+
+ PHP 4
+
+ By the winter of 1998, shortly after PHP 3.0 was officially
+ released, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski have begun working
+ on a rewrite of PHP's core. The design goals were to improve
+ performance of complex applications, and improve the
+ modularity of PHP's code base. Such applications were made
+ possible by PHP 3.0's new features and support for a wide
+ variety of 3rd party databases and APIs, but PHP 3.0 was
+ not designed to handle such complex applications efficiently.
+
+
+ The new engine, dubbed 'Zend Engine' (comprised of their
+ first names, Zeev and Andi), met these design goals
+ successfully, and was first introduced in mid 1999. PHP 4.0,
+ based on this engine, and coupled with a wide range of
+ additional new features, was officially released in May
+ 2000, almost two years after its predecessor, PHP 3.0.
+ In addition to the highly improved performance of this
+ version, PHP 4.0 included other key features such as
+ support for many more Web servers, HTTP sessions, output
+ buffering, more secure ways of handling user input and
+ several new language constructs.
+
+
+ PHP 4 is currently the latest released version of PHP. Work
+ has already begun on modifying and improving the Zend Engine
+ to integrate the features which were designed for PHP 5.0.
+
+
+ Today, PHP is being used by hundreds of thousands of developers
+ (estimated), and several million sites report as having it
+ installed, which accounts for over 20% of the domains on the
+ Internet.
+
+
+ PHP's development team includes dozens of developers, as well
+ as dozens others working on PHP-related projects such as PEAR
+ and the documentation project.
+
+
+
+
+
+ History of PHP related projects
+
+
+ PHP Documentation Project
+
+
+
+
-PHP's history
- Overview of PHP's development
+
+ PEAR
+
+ PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository (originally,
+ PHP Extension and Add-on Repository) is PHP's version of
+ foundation classes, and may grow in the future to be one
+ of the key ways to distribute both PHP and C-based PHP
+ extensions among developers.
+
+
+ PEAR was born in discussions held in the PHP Developers'
+ Meeting (PDM) held in January 2000 in Tel Aviv. It was
+ created by Stig S. Bakken, and is dedicated to his first-born
+ daughter, Malin Bakken.
+
+
+ Since early 2000, PEAR has grown to be a big, significant
+ project with a large number of developers working on
+ implementing common, reusable functionality for the
+ benefit of the entire PHP community. PEAR today includes
+ a wide variety of infrastructure foundation classes
+ for database access, content caching, mathematical
+ calculations, eCommerce and much more.
+
+
+
+
+ PHP Quality Assurance Initiative
+
+ The PHP Quality Assurance Initiative was set up in the
+ summer of 2000 in response to criticism that PHP releases
+ were not being tested well enough for production
+ environments. The team now consists of a core group of
+ developers with a good understanding of the PHP code
+ base. These developers spend a lot of their time
+ localizing and fixing bugs within PHP. In addition
+ there are many other team members who test and
+ provide feedback on these fixes using a wide variety
+ of platforms.
+
+
+
+
+ PHP-GTK
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Books about PHP
+
+ As PHP grew, it began to be recognized as a world-wide popular
+ development platform. One of the most interesting ways of
+ seeing this trend was by observing the books about PHP that
+ came out throughout the years.
+
+
+ To the best of our knowledge, the first book dedicated to
+ PHP was 'php- dynamische webauftritte professionell realisieren'
+ - a German book published in 1999, authored by Egon Schmid,
+ Christian Cartus and Richard Blume. The first book in English
+ about PHP was published shortly afterwards, and was 'Core
+ PHP Programming' by Leon Atkinson. Both of these books covered
+ PHP 3.0.
+
+
+ While these two books were the first of their kind - they were
+ followed by a large number of books from a host of authors and
+ publishers. There are over 40 books in English, 50 books in
+ German, and over 20 books in French! In addition, you can find
+ books about PHP in many other languages, including Spanish,
+ Korean, Japanese and Hebrew.
+
+
+ Clearly, this large number of books, written by different
+ authors, published by many publishers, and their availability
+ in so many languages - are a strong testimony for PHP's
+ world-wide success.
+
+
+
+
+ Publications about PHP
+
+ To the best of our knowledge, the first article about PHP in
+ a hard-copy magazine was published in the French Informatiques
+ Magazine, towards the end of 1998, and covered PHP 3.0. As with
+ books, this was the first in a series of many articles published
+ about PHP in various prominent magazines.
+
+
+ Articles about PHP appeared in Dr. Dobbs, Linux Enterprise,
+ Linux Magazine and many more. Articles about migrating PHP-based
+ applications to PHP under Windows even appear on Microsoft's
+ very own MSDN!
+
+
+
+