A brief history of CPAN

My project for CPAN Day has been to pull together a history of CPAN:

  • How it was started, and by whom
  • The other services that make up the CPAN ecosystem
  • The key modules that have helped shape CPAN

In best CPAN tradition, this is the work of dozens of people, who patiently responded to my pestering via email over the last few weeks. Thanks to everyone who helped get it to this point.

This is very much a first cut, and I've no doubt missed a lot of things that should be there. The master copy of the CPAN history lives on github, so you can raise issues or send me pull requests. There's a todo list at the end of the document with things I already plan to cover.

I'm thinking it might be fun to convert the source to some machine readable format, and generating the document from that. The source could then be used to generate a more interactive timeline.

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About Neil Bowers

user-pic Perl hacker since 1992.