As I briefly mentioned in the ChatterBox, tomorrow will mark 20 years that I've been hacking away at the IBM PC.

What's changed, and what's stayed the same. Well, it's a long list.

 ThenNow
Hardware IBM PC AT, 6Mhz 286 Processor, 40M hard drive, 640K RAM. White box, 1GHz Pentium 3 Processor, 20G hard drive, 512M RAM
OS MS DOS 3.3 Red Hat Linux 9
Communications link 1200 baud modem, dedicated phone line multi-homed on T1 (1.5Mpbs) and commercial DSL (3Mbps)
Communities Toronto PC Users Group, The Well Toronto Perl Mongers, Toronto Linux Users Group (GTALUG now, I think), Perl Monks, Groklaw, Slashdot

So the hardware and operating systems have changed, but the communities (in some revised fashion) continue .. and for me, that's the important part of the equation. No one (or perhaps very few) can know everything, so it's natural to form communities to support each other, debate the merits of a particular approach.

When I went to university, that's something that wasn't mentioned -- perhaps because I took Engineering and not Computer Science -- but forget the hardware, the operating system and all that other technology, the community is the most important thing. Perl is more than just the language, it's the community, and that's why it's such a vital, growing, developing, thriving language.

Thanks to you all for Perl Monks. And here's to another 20 years of happiness, challenge, craziness and fun.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

Update Naturally, I'm mortified to see that johnnywang wrote about the same idea, with the same title, some time back. Really, this just came to me when I realized it was twenty years ago today (er .. tomorrow) that I first used a PC. I had no intention of riding on anyone's coat-tails.

In reply to It's the Community, stupid! by talexb

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