Re:Perl NSA (Score 1)

If you read the Linux Magazine article, you know much of the scoop. In short, Larry wasn't working for the NSA. Rather, he was working for System Development Corporation in Santa Monica on a project called BLACKER. BLACKER was a project to develop an A1 Secure (TCSEC pre-TNI) Wide-Area Network. As part of the A1 requirements, we had to do configuration management. We had machines on two coasts. Larry, being lazy and impatient :-), decided to adapt inews to keep news articles in synch, and to allow appending "approvals" to existing articles. This gave him the CM databases. For reports, he tried to use awk, but discovered that it couldn't handle multiple files or formats well. Thus, Perl was born to produce BLACKER CM reports. I then started writing Perl scripts to do other activities (such as maintaining our documentation library in sych with the code), as Larry and I were sharing an office (and a carpool) at the time. Larry has told the rest of the story (and yes, I forgave him long ago. Don't get up to the bay area often enough to see him anymore :-() Daniel