Perl is a text-processing and general-purpose scripting language created by Larry Wall. According to perlhist, Perl’s own version-history document, Larry Wall released Perl 1.000 on December 18, 1987. The same document records the rapid patch releases that followed in early 1988, and Wall’s note that “Perl 1 introduced Perl to the world.”
Perl drew together features from Unix tools and the C language, including powerful regular expression support, making it well suited to gluing systems together and processing text. Through the 1990s it became the dominant language for writing CGI scripts behind early dynamic web pages, earning the informal title of the “duct tape of the Internet.”
The perlhist record documents the long line of releases that carried the language forward from that first 1987 version, establishing Perl as a foundational tool of early web programming.