On October 26, 1995, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) was established as a repository for the Perl language and Perl modules; as of December 2022, it carries over 211,850 modules in 43,865 distributions, written by more than 14,324 authors, and is mirrored worldwide at more than 245 locations. Perl 5.004 was released on May 15, 1997, and included, among other things, the UNIVERSAL package, giving Perl a base object from which all classes were automatically derived and the ability to require versions of modules. Another significant development was the inclusion of the CGI.pm module, which contributed to Perl's popularity as a CGI scripting language. Perl 5.004 added support for Microsoft Windows, Plan 9, QNX, and AmigaOS. Perl 5.005 was released on July 22, 1998. This release included several enhancements to the regex engine, new hooks into the backend through the B::* modules, the qr// regex quote operator, a large selection of other new core modules, and added support for several more operating systems, including BeOS. 2000–2020 Perl 5.6 was released on March 22, 2000. Major changes included 64-bit support, Unicode string representation, support for files over 2 GiB, and the "our" keyword. When developing Perl 5.6, the decision was made to switch the versioning scheme to one more similar to other open source projects; after 5.005_63, the next version became 5.5.640, with plans for development versions to have odd numbers and stable versions to have even numbers. In 2000, Wall put forth a call for suggestions for a new version of Perl from the community. The process resulted in 361 RFC (request for comments) documents that were to be used in guiding development of Perl 6. In 2001, work began on the "Apocalypses" for Perl 6, a series of documents meant to summarize the change requests and present the design of the next generation of Perl. They were presented as a digest of the RFCs, rather than a formal document. At this point, Perl 6 existed only as a description of a language. Perl 5.8 was first released on July 18, 2002, and had nearly yearly updates since then. Perl 5.8 improved Unicode support, added a new I/O implementation, added a new thread implementation, improved numeric accuracy, and added several new modules. As of 2013 this version still remains the most popular version of Perl and is used by Red Hat 5, Suse 10, Solaris 10, HP-UX 11.31 and