I started with Perl in Januari 1995. I had just finished a project that consisted of creating a website for a division of one of the largest multinationals of the world. All we had was a CD-ROM with images, and a (corrupt) ASCII dump of a database, and 160 hours. I did the job with a bunch of shell and awk programs. It took three hours to run, creating about 500 HTML pages, and about 1000 images.

Even during the project, I thought there should be a more convenient way. So, sometime after the project was completed, I started to learn Perl. I started with perl4, but within the hour I wanted to do multidimensional arrays. Not knowing how to do it, I looked for a Usenet group. Found comp.lang.perl, waited a few hours before my upstream UUCP nodes were configured to pass me the group. Soon after I started reading the group, I became aware perl4 was history. I got myself perl5.000h, read all the manuals back-to-back, and the rest is history.

Abigail