Re: History of MARC/Perl

On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 10:19:48AM -0600, Hahn, Harvey wrote:
> Galen Charlton wrote:
> |As part of a class project, I and my colleagues Diana Weaver and Kevin
> |Ford plan to create a digital archive to record the history of
> |MARC/Perl (i.e., MARC.pm and MARC::Record).
> 
> As Ed Summers pointed out, "It seems that the archives for the original
> list at vims.edu are no longer available."  However, they *are*
> partially available on the Internet Archive.  If you go to
> <http://www.archive.org/> and search for "http://vims.edu/perl4lib" (an
> educated guess on my part, based on Ed Summers' info; perhaps there were
> other later addresses along the way) on the Wayback Machine, you will
> find 26 snapshots of that address.  However, except for one circular
> reference (Apr 15, 2001), only the pages from Dec 6, 1999, to Jun 30,
> 2001, actually contain any information; the remaining pages show only an
> empty directory.
> 
> If you use the latest address (Jun 30, 2001), you will find viewable
> articles and viewable Perl4Lib archive messages from Jul 29, 1999 to Jul
> 30, 2000.  (Based on a very cursory examination, these include the
> seemingly earliest list messages relating to MARC.pm and its
> development.)  You can also find downloadable files of the earliest
> versions of MARC.pm available there via archived CPAN links.  (I checked
> the current CPAN site, and the oldest--that is, less than 1.0--are not
> there; but they *are* available through the IA Perl4Lib links to the
> IA-archived CPAN site.)  The link to the IA-archived MARC.pm SourceForge
> site also has some of the early/experimental versions (but not the
> earliest, as found on IA CPAN) of the software that you're seeking.
> 
> Hope this gives you some leads to the early history that you're
> documenting!
> 
> Harvey

You might also check BackPAN:

http://backpan.perl.org/
http://backpan.cpan.org/

The oldest I saw (from a cursory search) was MARC-0.81 from 1999-10-05:

http://backpan.perl.org/authors/id/B/BB/BBIRTH/

Paul.

-- 
Paul Hoffman <[email protected]>