"cURL", the URL Code That Can, Marks 25 Years of Transfers

upstart writes:

Utility began as a personal project, found its way into billions of devices:

Daniel Stenberg has observed the 25th anniversary of the curl open source project with the publication of curl 8.0.0, the 215th release of the command line tool, and a modest tele-celebration.

The name curl, originally rendered as "cURL" to emphasize its function, stands for "Client for URLs" or "Client URL Request Library" or its recursive form, "curl URL Request Library."

It's a command line tool and library for transferring data with URLs. Once installed on a device with command line access, curl can be used, through a text command, to send or fetch data to and from a server using a variety of network protocols.

Any developer who is serious about writing code that interacts over a network has probably used curl, or does so regularly. Presently, billions of devices rely on curl - cars, mobile phones, set top boxes, routers, and other such items use it internally for data transfer.

"The curl project started out very humbly as a small renamed URL transfer tool that almost nobody knew about for the first few years," said Stenberg in a blog post. "It scratched a personal itch of mine."

The first version of curl debuted on March 20, 1998 as version 4.0. It had 2,200 lines of code and had been adapted from projects known as httpget and urlget. As Stenberg explained, curl 4.0 supported just three protocols, HTTP, GOPHER and FTP, and 24 command line options. Version 8.0.0 can handle 28 protocols and 249 command line options.

"The first release of curl was not that special event since I had been shipping httpget and urlget releases for over a year already, so while this was a new name it was also 'just another release' as I had done many times already," he wrote.

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