James Atkinson is the creator of the software. He’s the first developer and now the project manager of the phpBB project. Like a lot of other open-source projects, phpBB started as a personal project. James wanted to set up a discussion forum on his wife’s site. At this time, he had two options: using a commercial package like the pioneer UBB (Ultimate Bulletin Board, written in Perl) or using the free solution named Phorum, which was written in PHP, but had a thread style James didn’t like very much. So he decided to go on his own and create a UBB-like PHP-based bulletin board system.

phpBB was "born" on July 1st, 2000, at 06:45 PM. We know the exact date and time, because that’s when James posted a message on an Internet forum saying that he had created a bulletin board and would like some help with the testing. A few weeks later he opened up the source code for the project, making it free and available for everyone who wanted to join in and contribute to the development.

Other enthusiasts joined, and on December 16th, 2000, the first official phpBB was released—phpBB version 1.0. After this, the release-feature requests-development-testing-release wheel started spinning for the phpBB team.

phpBB became really popular after version 2.0 was released on April 4th, 2002. This version was a complete rewrite of the source code, because the software had become much more feature rich than originally expected, and the old codebase just couldn’t accommodate the new development. The interface was also completely revamped.