Following on from some chat on chatterbox and from and from some comments on What is it about perl that makes it so cool I was interested to see where CPAN came from. It seems to be a widely held belief that CPAN is a great distingushing factor in why perl is as great as it is. OK so I did some investigating and came up with the following links.. A Perl timeline now from this large document I read the following paragraph:
The first ideas of what will become CPAN emerge on the Perl-packrats mailing list. Modeled after the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN) it would be an archive of all things Perl. (9 December)
There is actually a link to the original mail describing the idea that gave rise to CPAN here and it goes on. I will not place all the links in this node, suffice to say that I found it a very interesting.

Enjoy.
PS.. edited later take a look here for a potted history of perl itself. --

Zigster