CPAN History
When this author first discovered Perl in 1990, there was little or no means to bootstrap oneself into the learning phase of programming Perl. The version that was available to me at that time was 3.10, and it wasn't very easy to learn, unless one was already familiar with the sed, grep, awk, and other languages, including C, along with those dreaded UNIXisms, Regular Expressions. The UNIX manpage for Perl was long and tedious to read, and made many assumptions about the level of the reader, in terms of UNIX knowledge. At that time, I resolved that if I ever had a chance, I'd try to do something about that.
When the comp.lang.perl newsgroup came along, the common folk suddenly had access to the few true Perl wizards which existed at the time, including Larry himself, along with Randal and Tom, Mark Biggar, and a few others who either worked with Larry, were related to him, or had jumped onto the Perl bandwagon very early on. This made things a little easier when one had a problem, but the Usenet protocol, at that time, was quite a bit more respected, and thus I was a bit shy about posting arbitrary bonehead questions.
Then, in 1991, the first version of the Camel was printed, by the O'Reilly company. O'Reilly was kind enough to make available, along with UUNET, the examples which were given in the text, as a single compressed tar file. Suddenly, everything got a little easier. One could purchase the Camel, and then follow along directly with the examples. This still wasn't enough to become an expert, or even accomplish any given task, but it was a starting point.
Finally, in late 1991, I co-founded one of the first Mom 'n Pop ISPs in the country, Texas Metronet. Almost as soon as I had the root password, I took the collection of scripts which I'd gathered on the newsgroup, along with some of the other things I'd seen around here and there, and created a little ftp area, with some general hierarchy, including admin stuff, networking stuff, UI stuff, and assorted stuff; and the first "organized" Perl archive available on the Net was born. Now anyone could connect to this archive, and hopefully find a little ditty which would help them accomplish the task they had at hand, or at least get them started.
Since then, there's been a mailing list formed for discussion of matters relevant to archiving Perl, and, more importantly, the efforts of many separate Perl archivists all over the Net has been unified and integrated into a single, comprehensive effort known as the CPAN.