Wow, this is a great article! (other archive link - https://archive.is/XVCi7 )

I didn't realize arXiV was started in 1991. And then I wondered why I had never heard of it while I was at Cornell from 1997-2001. Apparently it only assumed the arXiV name in 1999.

I like that it was a bunch of shell scripts :)

Long before arXiv became critical infrastructure for scientific research, it was a collection of shell scripts running on Ginsparg’s NeXT machine.

Interesting connections:

As an undergrad at Harvard, he was classmates with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer; his older brother was a graduate student at Stanford studying with Terry Winograd, an AI pioneer.

On the move to the web in the early 90's:

He also occasionally consulted with a programmer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) named Tim Berners-Lee

And then there was a 1994 move to Perl, and 2022 move to Python ...

Although my favorite/primary language is Python, I can't help but wonder if "rewrite in Python" is mainly a social issue ... i.e. maybe they don't know how to hire Perl programmers and move to the cloud. I guess rewrites are often an incomplete transmission of knowledge about the codebase.

Another tidbit: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04188

FAQ 1: Why did you create arXiv if journals already existed? Has it developed as you had expected?

Answer: Conventional journals did not start coming online until the mid to late 1990s. I originally envisioned it as an expedient hack, a quick-and-dirty email-transponder written in csh to provide short-term access to electronic versions of preprints until the existing paper distribution system could catch up, within about three months.

So it was in csh on NeXT. Tim Berners-Lee also developed the web on NeXT!