The Pari library was started in 1987 - the same year as Perl - apparently by Professor Henri Cohen of the University of Bordeaux in France. Being able to do arithmetic with arbitrary precision and at high speed, it is an essential part of stacks like Crypt::OpenPGP. I have imported the oldest tarballs for pari I could find into git here.

While the README for pari 1.35 (1991) lists only 4 authors, by 1995 the
src/THANKS file in pari 1.39a breaks the contributors into double digits, and five years later in pari 2.0.16-BETA the list has grown considerably.

After that, development was moved to CVS, and at some point, converted to SVN. I am currently importing the ~10,000 commit pari repository into git, and will soon graft it on top of the old history. All this, so that I can include it into a git-ified Math::Pari repository as a submodule. The current maintainer of that module is Ilya Zakhharevitch, who has been a pari contributor since 1995 - over 13 years! As well as a front page Perl core contributor. Cheers to Ilya!