Converse is a brand of shoes (official website): https://www.converse.com/shop/shoes
From the context, I guess they were popular in the 1990s. I wouldn't know, I don't particularly follow fashion trends in shoes, but the writer of that quote apparently thinks so. So he's just trying to say that certainly things were fashionable in the 1990s, like wearing Converse shoes and writing CGI scripts in Perl. The two have nothing to do with each other, except that both were popular in the 1990s. The writer is just trying to be amusing by talking about programming languages and fashion trends together. He refers to a programming language like it was in the same category as a fashion trend. The point would have been the same if he had talked about a popular TV show of the time, or a popular rock band, etc.