It's hard to know where to start on this -- volumes could be written. But I'll do my best to be concise. Traditionally Make has been a standard, integral part of UNIX, and UNIX-like (*NIX) systems. In fact, that's how you often built the system you were installing. This makes for a great deal of flexibility, and personalization -- hey, everybody likes choices. Anyway, This wasn't the case, with MS-DOS/Windows, presumably because they were a "for profit" company, and they already had a product they sold, that provided a make. On the other hand, this also paved the way for the likes of ActiveState. Well, given that Perl is free, and the fact that MS products didn't come with a free version of make, someone created nmake (I've forgotten details, and wikipedia doesn't provide accurate details). Which was a free version of make. That would run within dos (MS-DOS). Did you know that make will allow you to build Perl, and install it where ever you want to? Did you also know that every time you download a Perl Module, and unpack it, you can use Perl, and make to make, and install it? Did you also know that having make allows you to install 16 (or more) different versions of Perl, and by simply providing PERFIX=, you can install them anywhere you want to? See also: perlbrew

I wish I could clearly recall the actual origin, and author of nmake. But I'll update this, if I do (recall/find it).

Hope this helped, and best wishes.

--Chris

Yes. What say about me, is true.