Oh fascinating, thanks! Yeah CPAN dates to about 1993. CPAN in turn was based on CTAN (for TeX), which Wikipedia dates to 1991 or 1992. I used both systems in t

Oh fascinating, thanks! Yeah CPAN dates to about 1993. CPAN in turn was based on CTAN (for TeX), which Wikipedia dates to 1991 or 1992. I used both systems in the early/mid 90s and they were not very good. CPAN in particular had a penchant for deciding to rebuilding and reinstall everything, including the Perl interpreter. I assume the general idea is older, going back to at least the 70s and minicomputers or the like.