[encloser]

Not the OP, but when I was doing CGI scripts Perl 5 wasn't released yet. And even when it was it took a long while for people and systems to migrate. Quite a bit of the early web apps were written in Perl 4 style.

[pjmlp]

Perl 5 has been around since 1995.

I was already using it a year later, for our distributed computing labs, where doing a CGI in C and Perl was part of one exercise.