I'll admit, he had me going until I saw the byline at the end.

If you were following these sorts of things starting in the '70s like me you'd have noticed it's roots going back to then (the last Nike missiles were decommissioned in the late '70s) and that it was updated to the issues of the '80s, with only the smallest modern gloss like whitehouse.gov added later.

Perl did start in 1987 according to Wikipedia but I wonder if it got really big prior to the publication of the Camel Book in 1991 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Early_Perl_versions).