Re: Why TCL?

On 2005-12-08, Cameron Laird <claird@lairds.us> wrote:
> ... and that's not all. Already fossilized are several earlier efforts
> to build public repositories, extending back, I think, even before CPAN
> was prominent: ones hosted by NeoSoft, Alcatel (?), ...

<TRIPPING_DOWN_MEMORY_LANE>

I can confirm that the very first Tcl/Tk Contrib Archive predated CPAN by
at least four years (the official Perl Timeline[1] puts CPAN's inception
in late 1995). I set up myself in mid-1991, using some spare HD space
on a Sun Sparcserver 4/90 that I was sysadmining on behalf of the ME
department at UC Berkeley (ironically, I never met Prof Ousterhout during
my four years there).

I ran it for over a year, soliciting contributions from folks and putting
them up for FTP in a organized hierarchy complete with short READMEs that
I wrote up to briefly describe each extension. All in all, I didn't
spend more than about an hour a week doing this, but there weren't as
many extensions then as now.

Then I graduated in Spring 1992 and *fumbled* the handoff of the Archive
to my sysadmin successor (he apparently didn't have the same commitment
to Tcl that I did 8-). When I resurfaced on the Net almost two years
later, someone at Neosoft (I forget who) had rescued the Archive, and
the rest is, well, history.

</TRIPPING_DOWN_MEMORY_LANE>

[1] http://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html
Received on Fri Dec 23 18:58:16 2005