In the Beginning…
The beginnings are rather simple, and maybe a little mundane; Larry Wall (Tim Toady) released version 1.0 to the newsgroup comp.sources.misc on the 18th December 1987 while working as a programmer at Unisys. Perl was intended, we believe, to be a Unix scripting language to make report processing easier borrowing from sh, Awk and Sed.
Perl 2 was released in 1988 and added more features and a better regular expression engine, this was followed by Perl 3 in 1989, Perl 4 in 1991 to coincide with the Camel Book, until finally we have Perl 5 in 1994. Perl 5 was a major shift in the release of version numbers which I will touch upon below. Perl 6 started its life cycle in 2000 with a different principle to other versions of Perl. It was a complete re-write of the language and would start as a language specification before a release leading to the now apocryphal ‘released in time for Christmas’ line.
Further reading see http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/12/the-first-twenty-five-years.html
