This history has been built from information found on http://history.perl.org

• 1969
  • UNIX is born at Bell Labs. It was not until well into 1970 that Brian Kernighan suggested the name `Unix', in a somewhat treacherous pun on `Multics', the operating system we know today was born.
  
  
• 1972
  • The programming language C is born at the Bell Labs. C is one of Perl's ancestors, Perl is also implemented using C.
  
  
• 1973
  • grep is introduced by Ken Thompson as an ingenious componentization: the built-in regular expressions and commands of the ed (the standard editor at the time) are separated into an external utility: Global REgular expression Print. Perl was built to have some of the functionality of GREP.
  
  
• 1977
  • The computer language awk is designed by Alfred V. Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian W. Kernighan. awk is one of Perl's ancestors.
  
  
• 1978
  • BTL (Bell Telephone Labs) releases UNIX V7 which diverges into the commercial (System V) and academic (BSD, Berkeley Software Distribution) branches. This UNIX release was written entirely in C.
  
  
  • A shell by Stephen Bourne, simply known as the 'sh', is released. sh is one Perl's ancestors. Other shells, such as bash, csh, zsh, and ksh follow much later.
  
  
• 1981
  • Eric Allman develops Sendmail which will become the most widely used MTA on the internet.
  
  
• 1982
  • Sun Microsystems is incorporated with 4 employees.
  
  
• 1983
  • Desktop workstations come into being, many with Berkeley UNIX (4.2 BSD) which includes IP networking software.
  
  
• 1984
  • The GNU Project is started to develop a free UNIX-like operating system. The GNU Manifesto, written by Richard Stallman, sets the stage for the coming OpenSource revolution.
  
  
  • During the third quarter of the Super Bowl, Apple airs the famous Ridley Scott commercial depicting an Orwellian IBM World saved by the Macintosh. The Macintosh featured a zippy 8MHz 68000 Motorola chip (my TI-89 has a 25MHz 68K family chip), a 9" black and white built-in monitor, 128k (that's KB, not MB) of RAM and sold for the bargain price of $2,495.
  
  
  • Domain Name System (DNS), originally called JEEVES and later BIND, is developed by Paul Mockapetris, later to be maintained by Paul Vixie.
  
  
  • The first version of the X Window System is developed jointly by MIT Project Athena and Digital Equipment Corporation.
  
  
  • NFS (the current *NIX method for sharing files over a network) is first introduced.
  
  
  
• 1986
  • Microsoft infec^H^H^Htroduces Windows to the world.
  
  
• 1987
  • Perl 1.000 is unleashed upon the world. The description from the original man page sums up this new language well.
    

    	NAME
    		perl | Practical Extraction and Report Language
    
    	SYNOPSIS
        	perl [options] filename args
    
    	DESCRIPTION
         	Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning  arbi-
         	trary  text  files,  extracting  information from those text
         	files, and printing reports based on that information.  It's
         	also  a good language for many system management tasks.  The
         	language is intended to be practical  (easy  to  use,  effi-
         	cient,  complete)  rather  than  beautiful  (tiny,  elegant,
         	minimal).  It combines (in  the  author's  opinion,  anyway)
         	some  of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people
         	familiar with those languages should have little  difficulty
         	with  it.  (Language historians will also note some vestiges
         	of csh, Pascal, and  even  BASIC|PLUS.)   Expression  syntax
         	corresponds  quite  closely  to C expression syntax.  If you
         	have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk  or  sh,
         	but  it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little fas-
         	ter, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C,  then
         	perl  may  be  for  you.  There are also translators to turn
         	your sed and awk scripts  into  perl  scripts.   OK,  enough
         	hype.
    	

• 1988
  • Internet Relay Chat (IRC) developed by Jarkko Oikarinen. Later #perl (read as pound perl) would appear on EFNet, forming an essential part of Perl Culture.
  
  
  • Sun releases the SPARCstation 1.
  
  
  • John Ousterhout writes Tcl or "Tool Command Language".
  
  
  • Perl 2.000 released.
  
  
• 1989
  • Tom Christiansen presents the first public Perl tutorial at the Baltimore Usenix.
  
  
  • Perl 3.000 is released and is distributed by Larry for the first time under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL).
  
  
• 1990
  • Python invented by Guido van Rossum at CWI in Amsterdam.
  
  
  • Convex becomes the first major computer vendor to include Perl as part of its standard operating system distribution.
  
  
• 1991
  • Perl 4.000 is released and includes an artistic license as well as the GPL.
  
  
  • Linus Torvalds releases the first version of Linux. Linus had wanted to name it Freax (free + freak + unix) but the site administrator liked Linux better. It was distributed under the GNU Public License.
  
  
  • Sun unveils Solaris 2 for the SPARC, a System V variant.
  
  
• 1993
  • FreeBSD 1.0 is released and distributed via Walnut Creek CDROM.
  
  
• 1994
  • The much anticipated Perl 5.000 is unveiled. It was a complete rewrite of Perl. Today, a variant of 5.0 is still the most stable release (5.8).
  
  
• 1995
  • Rasmus Lerdorf created a Perl CGI script which inserted a tag into the HTML code of his page, and collected the information on the visitors. He called the logging code PHP-Tools for "Personal Home Page", because for him, the use was for his personal home page. A few inquires came in asking how they could get the tools, and Lerdorf decided to give it away.
  
  
  • First official public release (0.6.2) of the Apache web server (now the most widely used on the internet).
  
  
  • Sun launches JAVA.
  
  
• 1997
  • O'Reilly announces their partnership with ActiveState which will assist in producing the Win32 Perl Resource Kit and Oneperl.
  
  
• 1998
  • Netscape announces that it is going to release (some of) the source code to Netscape Navigator, though not under the GPL. The source will hit the net on the March 31st. This sets the stage for the "Open Source" project Mozilla.
  
  
  • The term "Open Source" is coined in Palo Alto, Ca.
  
  
  • Sun Microsystems, makes Solaris available under a free license to individual users, also to educational/non-profit/research institutions. They view it as a way to 'aggressively expand their developer base'.
  
  
• 1999
  • Al Gore reveals that "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet."
  
  
  • ActiveState announces a three year agreement with Microsoft to help development of Perl on the Windows Platform.
  
  
• 2000
  • Microsoft reports that it will include ActivePerl 5.6 in the next release of MS Window Services for Unix 2.0.
  
  
  • The Oxford English Dictionary investigates the origin of the word "Perl" while considering it for an entry in the next edition. Perl will be included and the entry will resemble the entry below.
    
    Perl Brit.
    Perl, perl, irreg. PERL
    Computing.
    perl n. ,
    arbitrarily chosen for its positive connotations, with omission of -a- to differentiate it from an existing programming language called Pearl. Coined by Larry Wall in the summer of 1987; the program was publicly released on 18 December of that year. Acronymic expansions of the name (such as Practical Extraction and Report Language and Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister), though found in the earliest documention for the language, were formed after the name had been chosen. Coinage details confirmed by personal communication from L. Wall, May 2000. A high-level interpreted programming language widely used for a variety of tasks and especially for applications running on the World Wide Web. The form Perl is preferred for the language itself; perl is used for the interpreter for the Perl language. 1988 J. Vromans Perl Reference Card.