As someone who is in the genomics world now as a software person, I find it amusing that I've gotten more into perl over the last year or so. It has its place, in the way that grep/sed/awk/etc does.
IMHO the person who "saved the genome project" was WJ Kent, who developed the assembler, BLAT, that the public project needed. I strive to point out that he wasn't a sole hero, nor was Lincoln. What I really like about BLAT is that while Celera was using Big Iron UNIX (massive 64-bit 64GB machines with 10s of terabytes of central high performance storage), BLAT ran on a cluster of linux machines, right around the time that people were waking up to the fact that linux was becoming a useful tool for scientific data processing. BLAT's design allowed it to work on a cluster of cheaper/smaller machines, while celera's algorithm really needed a massive shared memory single machine. it was sort of a microcosm of the larger battle being fought between Big iron UNIX and little intel linux at the time.
smaller organizations were realizing they could get slower computers power pretty cheap, and they could get a whole lot of them. There was a little flurry of activity with flocking algorithms, objective-c had a little renaissance due to swarm computing. probably the most famous and lasting was map-reduce, from alphabet, but they were called google back then.
there were a bunch of clever little tricks, like channel bonded network cards to make multiple cards look like one fast card, so you could double or triple bandwidth.
The beowulf cluster joke was kind of the spirit of the scrappy, make something cool out of junk approach while calling companies like sun, hp, compaq dinosaurs. and it continued for a while with people building stuff like this - https://ncsa30.ncsa.illinois.edu/2003/05/ncsa-creates-sony-p... I think there was some weirdness with export controls of ps2's for this kind of stuff.
I don't remember what pc chip was the new hotness back then, it was a good 20 years ago and my memory is dim.
but that, I think, captures the gist of the meme.
However, I got into the genomics world in the early aughts, and the perl hung on and on and on. I remember starting a new job in the mid-teens, and one of the first tasks I had was to port over a legacy perl script. Such is the world of scientific software. 99% of the people I know who have touched perl since ~2003ish are in the bioinformatics space.
And if I remember correctly BLAT was so useful because it could be run on machines with less cpu power by loading more data into memory…or was it the other way around?