CPAN was named after (in imitation of) CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. CTAN was named by George Greenwade — the idea was to bring together (network

CPAN was named after (in imitation of) CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. CTAN was named by George Greenwade — the idea was to bring together (network) various TeX archives that various people had collected. See: • https://www.cpan.org/authors/id/H/HF/HFB/grok-cpan-1.01.pdf https://www.cpan.org/authors/id/H/HF/HFB/grok-cpan-1.01.pdf (page 3) • https://ctan.org/ctan/?lang=en https://ctan.org/ctan/?lang=en or http://dante.ctan.org/what_is_ctan.html http://dante.ctan.org/what_is_ctan.html