[adrianmonk]

On pp. 381-382, my copy of Programming Perl (1992 printing of first edition) says he was trying to build a configuration management system for 6 Vax and 6 Sun machines, and he needed to solve some problems like file replication across a 1200 baud link and approvals. So he installed B-news, the Usenet news software at the time. Then he was asked to generate some reports and:

> News was maintained in separate files on a master machine, with lots of cross references between files. Larry's first thought was "Let's use awk." Unfortunately, awk couldn't handle opening and closing of multiple files based on information in the files. Larry didn't want to have to code a special-purpose tool. As a result, a new language was born.

So that's why it's the Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. He wanted to extract data from files and generate reports.