I was a big user of rn in the 80's. I worshiped Mr. Wall from afar. Anyone who could write a 30-page manpage and have it make sense was All Good.

I saw Perl 1 go by in comp.sources.unix in 87. Pulled it down. Compiled it. Stared at the manpage a bit, and said "naah, I know awk better than this" (I was doing 1000-line awk programs!) and set it aside.

But along came Perl 2. Downloaded it. Started playing with it. "Hey, this is pretty cool." And one by one, my new scripts were Perl rather than awk/sed/grep/m4/elisp.

And so I started my advocacy role, which I still hold today. I snuck into comp.unix.questions and comp.unix.shell and started answering questions with shorter Perl answers than the complex shell scripts they were providing: an experience that I had had myself. I did it often enough that eventually people were tagging "No Perl Please!" at the end of each post.

And then Larry announced on the Perl support mailing list (prior to comp.lang.perl) that he was working on Perl 3. It would be grand. You could reimplement rn in Perl, if you chose (but nobody ever did). And he asked if there were any volunteers that would be on the alpha test team (sort of a "perl 3 porters" group). I jumped at the chance, and provided porting advice and feedback on a few features that were missing or seemed awkward. (I invented the underscore stat handle and the (LIST)[SLICE] during that phase.)

Then Perl 3 was released to the world. The online documentation went from 20 pages to 64 pages.

Someone on usenet wondered if a book was in the works, now that Perl had gotten so much more complicated. I publicly offered my services to help with the online documentation, since I had had both a strong writing background (I had a whole shelf of books I'd ghost-written already) and was intimately familiar with Perl 3.

A system admin at O'Reilly noticed my post, wrote me back privately saying "if you want to write a book, we should publish it", and put me in touch with Tim himself.

After a brief discussion in email, I invited Larry to work with me on the book. After our first size-up meeting a few weeks later (in a Carrows restaurant in Salem, Oregon, continuing later to his brother's house), I scribbled out an outline, we refined it together, and a contract was signed.

We worked on the book entirely by email and FTP, spending only about a half hour total on the phone. About a year later, I met Larry for the second time in Dallas in January 1990, where we signed over 200 copies of the new Camel book at the LISA conference.

That's probably enough early history for this posting.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker