Happy birthday PEAR! PEAR is turning 5.
If one takes Malin Bakken's (to whome PEAR is dedicated) birthday as the beginning of PEAR, today is Malin's and PEAR's 5th birthday. The first bit of code for PEAR was commited 1 day later, so this is a reasonable approximation in my eyes for the birth of PEAR.
This celebration should be a reason to take a little view on the beginnings of PEAR. Some historical highlights, quoted from the PEAR website:
1999-11-21 : Malin Bakken was born
1999-11-22 : The first few lines of PEAR code were committed (DB.php)
2000-07-24 : The PEAR and PEAR_Error classes were born
2000-08-01 : First working version of the "pear" command
2001-05-15 : First contributor to base system
2001-12-28 : First package uploaded to the current pear.php.net
2002-05-26 : Installer can upgrade itself
2002-06-13 : First version of Gtk installer
2002-07-11 : First version of Web installer
In this sense: HAPPY BIRTHDAY MALIN! HAPPY BIRTHDAY PEAR!