Particle identification is very important in nuclear and particle physics experiments. Time of flight system (TOF) plays an important role in particle identification such as the separation of pion, kaon and proton. Multi-gap resistive plate chamber (MRPC) is a new kind of avalanche gas detector and it has excellent time resolution power. The intrinsic time resolution of narrow gap MRPC is less than 10 ps. So the MRPC technology TOF system is widely used in modern physics experiments for particle identification. With the increase of accelerator energy and luminosity, the TOF system is required to indentify definite particles precisely under high rate environment. The MRPC technology TOF system can be defined as three generations according to the timing and rate requirement. The first-generation TOF is based on the float glass MRPC and its time resolution is around 80 ps, but the rate is relatively low (typically lower than 100 Hz/cm ²). The typical systems are TOF of RHIC-STAR, LHC-ALICE and BES III endcap. For the second-generation TOF, its time resolution has the same order as that for the first generation, but the rate capability is much higher. Its rate capability can reach 30 kHz/cm ². The typical experiment with this high rate TOF is FAIR-CBM. The biggest challenge is in the third-generation TOF. For example, the momentum upper limit of $ {\rm{K}}/{\text{π}}$ separation is around 7 GeV/c for JLab-SoLID TOF system under high particle rate as high as 20 kHz/cm ², and the time requirement is around 20 ps. The readout electronics of first two generations is based on time over threshold method, and pulse shape sampling technology will be used in the third-generation TOF. In the same time, the machine learning technology LSTM network is also used to analyze the time performance. As a very successful sample, MRPC barrel TOF has been used in RHIC-STAR for more than ten years and many important physics results have been obtained. A prominent result is the observation of antimatter helium-4 nucleus. This discovery proves the existence of antimatter in the early universe. In this paper, we will describe the evolution of MRPC TOF technology and key technology of each generation of TOFs including MRPC detector and related electronics. The industrial and medical usage of MRPC are also introduced in the work finally.