The name Buzz Moschetti probably isn’t familiar to you. Buzz was the author of the Perl 4 database for Interbase known as Interperl.

Back in those days Perl 5 was barely a twinkle in Larry’s eye and database interfaces for Perl 4 required building a custom perl binary.

Buzz was one of the four people to get the email on September 29th 1992 from Ted Lemon that started the perldb-interest project which defined a specification that ultimately lead to the DBI. (The other people were Kurt Andersen re informix, Kevin Stock re oraperl, and Michael Peppler re sybperl. I joined a few days later.)

Update: It turns out that it was actually Buzz who sent that original email, Ted just forwarded it on to others, including me. So Buzz can be said to have started the process that led to the DBI!

I hadn’t heard from Buzz for many years until he sent me an email recently.

This is his story: Continue reading →