Missing the "All of the above" choice :)

I started with perl-4.016 replacing my awk,sed and sed scripts collection. Soon after I implemented a Unify database UI into perl-4 taking oraperl as example code. It saved me tons of time and prototyping became a breeze (had to do part of the work in K&R C code those days).

I got lots of help from the community, which was a lot smaller those days.

Internet was expensive on dial-in modems, so off-line manuals (and books) were vital, and they were way above average and really helpful.

Conversion scripts vor awk to perl and sed to perl were included in the basic distribution, which was how I learned my first perl coding.

The error messages where spot-on most of the time.

But most amazing was how well perl code matched my way of thinking. The TIMTOWTDI might have been what kept me using perl up till today.