October 2008 Archives

My friend and colleague Andy Turner just posted some interesting graphs that measure changes in the CPAN's activity rates over the last decade or so. (CPAN being Perl's distributed, internet-based archive of code libraries and other stuff, and approximately 51 percent of what makes Perl my favorite programming language.)

I'm interested to see that the number of new users started to drop off a few years ago, but the activity of existing users has been increasing so much that the archive's overall activity continues to trend upwards.

If I had to guess a single reason for this, it'd involve the community getting better over the last several years at corralling many hackers together into large, frequently updated projects, which then get stored in the CPAN under a single username (as that's a limitation of the system). I think, for example, of DBIx::Class's recent ascendency, and clear community dominance, over the thousand SQL-abstraction modules that came before it. So you have fewer instances of people creating new CPAN author accounts just to upload their own wheel-reinventions.

My friend Noah, a sysadmin at MIT, reports that on October 1 he switched off the info-mac hyperarchive (hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu), one of the oldest websites on the internet. It was a web-accessible version of the info-mac archive, an online repository of Mac freeware and shareware, which before then was mainly browsable via FTP. I have fond memories of spending evenings trolling through the hyperarchive's directory structure, looking for neat stuff to fill my Mac LC's 40 GB hard drive, circa 1994.

Several years ago, when I was writing the Nutshell book, I discussed the possibility of being the hyperarchive's volunteer maintainer. Nothing came of it, though, and the server was allowed to coast into electronic senescence. I see from that Wikipedia article that there exists an info-mac website that claims lineage from the original archive and mailing list, but it's now just one more computer-news website in a vast sea. It does sport a mirror of the info-mac archive, where it's quickly apparent how little traffic it got since the turn of the decade; viewing some categories by date shows you software from the 1990s on the first page.

Though the hyperarchive's role was supplanted by better-organized websites years ago (hello, versiontracker), I won't forget its important role in the early history of Macintosh software, the web, and myself as a computer dood. Goodbye, old friend!