Jason Hunter writes in email:

Perl is the duct tape of the internet. Created by Larry Wall in 1987 and made famous with his Programming Perl "camel book" published by O'Reilly, it's the tool sysadmins use to keep things running.

We're proud to announce we've finished loading the Perl.org mailing list history into MarkMail. A total of 530,000 emails across 75 lists. The lists don't go back to 1987 (boy that'd be cool if they did). But that's all right; who really needs tech support against Perl 1.000?

What we have here is traffic starting with the migration to the Perl.org setup in 1999:

Enjoy! And if anyone has earlier archives, let us know.

This is awesome. Markmail also has mailing list history for php, ruby, mysql, postgresql, and all of the Apache projects. (Coverage of Python and Linux is very limited.) And as I wrote previously on Radar, the markmail search and trend graphing interface is really slick. Google ought to buy these guys and offer this product as an upgrade to Google Trends! Not to mention applying some of their interface insights into other Google search products.