I started learning PHP in 1999. I built an internship management solution for a big French business school (ESCP-EAP). Last time I checked, they were still using it in 2019... 😅 It was using Oracle on Linux Suse. That's when I also started learning SQL. I used PHPlib at the time because PHP3 didn't support user sessions natively. Before using PHP, I tried Apple Webobjects, which was a very interesting technology coming from NeXT if I remember correctly, and so I also learnt Objective-C on the first version of Mac OSX Server. I remember having hard time to install PHP on this OS.