The first internal version (0.9.0) was programmed by Tobias Ratschiller from Switzerland, and bears the date September 09, 1998. He then released version 1.0.1 on October 26, 1998. The early versions were offered on Tobias's site http://www.phpwizard.net (this site is no longer associated with him). Tobias wrote in the accompanying notes:
This work is based on Peter Kuppelwieser's MySQL-Webadmin. It was his idea to create a web-based interface to MySQL using PHP3. Although I have not used any of his source-code, there are some concepts I've borrowed from him. phpMyAdmin was created because Peter told me he wasn't going to further develop his (great) tool.
Compared to today's version (twelve years after the original version), the first version was somewhat limited in features. Nevertheless it could be used to create databases and tables, edit their structures, and enter and retrieve data. In the following screenshot, you can see that the navigation panel was already in place to list database names (not table names yet), and the main panel was the workspace to manage a database or table. This is how the interface for databases looked like in version 1.3.0:
To work on a table, the following screen was available:
I was using phpMyAdmin from version 1.2.0 (released November 29, 1998), and was immediately hooked to the idea of being able to use a web application to maintain a remote database. However, students at Collège de Sherbrooke, where I work in Québec, Canada, are French speaking folks. Therefore, I contacted Tobias and offered to transform his source code by outsourcing all messages to a message file. He accepted the offer, and I created both the English and French message files. Then, on December 27, 1998, Tobias released version 1.3.1, the first multi-language version. (Meanwhile, he had created the German message file.) This version was the first to display Welcome to phpMyAdmin.
In 1999 and the first half of 2000, Tobias, helped by other contributors, improved the navigation system, added features, and merged more language files. His project site maintained a discussion forum allowing new ideas to come along and patches to be discussed. Version 2.1.0 was released on August 06, 2000, and this was the last version released by Tobias, who had no more time to devote to this project.