chromatic is looking for stories of Perl over the last 20 years

As you may know, Perl is now 20 years old. In lieu of buying her a beer and waiting around for a year, I'm looking for interesting stories and memories to collect and post on a Perl-related website with a very nice and short domain name in the next couple of days. Please send them to chromatic@oreilly.com, along with a one sentence biography.

I don't have any that come to mind, but I do remember getting turned on to Awk and its associative arrays, now called hashes in Perl. To a C programmer in the late 80s, the ability to index an array BY A STRING blew my mind.