I came to PHP just a bit before that from doing everything with server-side includes and Cold Fusion. I still have the source code for my old website with a bunch of .shtml files.

It's fun looking back at the things that were awesome before they were terrible. I remember thinking that ADODB was a pretty sweet database layer that would let me change from one database to another. Then PDO came around. I've still never moved a project from one database to another.