How it started

Back in 1996, Daniel Stenberg was writing an IRC
bot in his spare time, an automated program that would offer services for the
participants in a chatroom dedicated to the Amiga computer (#amiga on the IRC
network EFnet). He came to think that it would be fun to get some updated
currency rates and have his bot offer a service online for the chat room users
to get current exchange rates, to ask the bot “please exchange 200 USD into
SEK” or similar.

In order to have the provided exchange rates as accurate as possible, the bot
would download the rates daily from a web site that was hosting them. A small
tool to download data over HTTP was needed for this task. A quick look-around
at the time had Daniel find a tiny tool named httpget (written by a Brazilian
named Rafael Sagula). It did the job, almost, just needed a few little a tweaks
here and there and soon Daniel had taken over maintenance of the few hundred
lines of code it was.

HttpGet 1.0 was subsequently released on April 8th 1997 with brand new HTTP
proxy support.

We soon found and fixed support for getting currencies over GOPHER. Once FTP
download support was added, the name of the project was changed and urlget 2.0
was released in August 1997. The http-only days were already passed.

The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the
name once again was misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20,
1998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names was
kept.)

We consider March 20 1998 to be curl’s birthday.