I read about perl4 in a magazine and thought it would be a good replacement for our never ending combinations of sh/awk/sed and compiled C-programs. The boss allowed me to order the CD from the US. No internet then in our company. It proved to be a good choice. And awk2perl and sed2perl were a big help - then.

Later I built in Unify database support into perl4. Don't ask: you don't want to go there.

Then came perl5, with DBI! I waited a few years and as nobody else did, I wrote DBD::Unify. Using that with all the shiny new features in perl5 caused a rapid development of using perl in our daily process, so old perl4 scripts were rewritten to perl5, including all formatting stuuf using format. Perl5 however had a bug. In or about 2001, they said to fix that myself in the core if I knew any C, as nobody was interested in dealing with format-related code. I fixed it and I then knew why people stayed away from that code.

A while later Jarkki asked me to take over responsibility for Configure in CORE. The vortex never ends, ad I am still around. Many conferences, meetings, patches, modules, more patches and new features later, I still see perl as my main development tool: it just gets the job done.