It was in a long forgotten era. Apache didn't exist yet. Mosaic ruled the webbrowser market, Netscape had just released its first betas. Microsoft was thinking they could ignore the existance of the Internet. Eternal September had only just started. Life was still good.

A division of a very large consumer electronics company wanted to have a website. All they had was a corrupted (ASCII) dump of a database, with lots of typos and a CD-ROM with images of their products. We had 160 hours to create a website.

I created a large bunch of shell and AWK programs that would create the website out of the database dump and the CD-ROM. Running time: over 3 hours to generate about 500 html pages and a 1000 images. (They came with a new dump and new images the day before we went "life")

After that, I was sure it could have been done better in a different language than sh and AWK (although you can do pretty amazing things in AWK if you know it well). Hence, I learned myself Perl. I had 4.036 on my computer, but after less than an hour playing with it, I wanted to use multidimensional arrays. Not supported by 4.036, so I joined the Usenet group, realized there was perl5, downloaded it, and started studying the manual pages.

I've hardly used another language since.

Abigail

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