by curl author Daniel Stenberg looks back on the twenty-five years of the project. He was 27 years old when he released the first version of curl as a software engineer at Frontec Tekniksystem, mainly doing contract development of embedded systems for Swedish product development companies. He developed a habit at that time, staying up late every night to spend an hour or two working on the development of personal projects. The development philosophy behind curl is to gradually iterate and improve in all aspects. It didn’t suddenly become popular. It’s hard to estimate how many users curl has today, but it’s estimated to be well over 10 billion, and URL’s API library, libcurl, is used by nearly every networked device and system. His curl journey began at the end of 1996, when he downloaded httpget, a tool developed by Rafael Sagula, to automatically download currency exchange rates every day to ensure that his currency converter was working properly. There are bugs in httpget, and he submitted a patch to the author. Rafael thought he could take over maintaining the project, so he did. He gradually added support for GOPHER, changed the project name, added support for FTP, and added support for FTP uploads in early 1998…then history.
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/03/20/twenty-five-years-of-curl/
