Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the birth of curl. Daniel, the founder, reviewed the twenty-five years of the project.

Daniel said he was 27 years old when he released the first version of curl while working as a software engineer at Frontec Tekniksystem, mainly engaged in contract development of embedded systems for large Swedish product development companies. For example, in the late 1990s he worked on a number of projects at telecommunications giant Ericsson.

Also since then, Daniel has developed a habit of staying up for an hour or two every night to develop personal projects. Daniel continues the habit to this day—for decades.

Daniel talks about the development philosophy behind curl:Improve every aspect of it incrementally and iteratively. In addition to being active, enhance the code, add test cases, and improve the text. Week after week, year after year.

Likewise, curl didn’t suddenly become popular, nor did it experience skyrocketing user numbers. Instead, the number of curl users and the popularity of the tool and library has grown gradually and continuously. Started with a handful of users in 1998, it has grown to hundreds of millions of users by 2010.

Daniel also doesn’t know the current number of users and installations of curl. Based on the fact that there are 7 billion smartphones and 1 billion tablets in the world, it is estimated that the installation of curl has exceeded 10 billion.because of curlThe API library libcurl is used by nearly every networked device and system.

According to Daniel, his “internet transfer tool” journey began in late 1996—two years before the release of curl. At that time he downloaded httpget, a tool developed by Rafael Sagula, to automatically download currency exchange rates on a daily basis to ensure that his currency converter was working properly for the IRC bot. However, httpget has some flaws, so he submitted a patch to the author. And Rafael quickly decided to let Daniel take over his maintenance duties. So Daniel took over the development and maintenance of httpget. He gradually added support for GOPHER, changed the project name, added support for FTP, and added support for FTP uploads in early 1998… followed by the various experiences and important nodes of curl and Daniel.

▲ Curl’s initial logo

Daniel admits that taking curl to this point and being able to work on his hobby project full-time has been a dream come true for him. curl is already a big part of his life. He’s been working with curl longer than he’s been with any company, and even Daniel’s kids aren’t as old as curl.

25 years ago, Google didn’t exist, and neither did Firefox.