Curl Turns 10k Days

{{actor}} deleted this content

.

I have a lot of 'thank god for curl' moments ... I will reach back to one of the first - It was sometime in 1999 ... working on www.littlewoods-pools.co.uk (one of the first sites to make an online bet) ... every weekend the football results from Press Association would update football scores, 'spot the ball' picture and various other things ... this particular weekend I was on holiday near the town of Looe, UK ... and got an emergency fone call 'Jim everything broke' saturday afternoon ... can you update the results ?

I found a weird portable compaq computer which had ethernet card (donated to a local church!), I found a 56k baud modem (at the town offices), I talked through setting up ftp server on the box by fone ... mightily struggled to get trumpet winsock! to get onto the interwebs - many failures getting any ftp clients to work/compile - late saturday evening I got curl source and was able to eventually compile it (after chopping away stuff) ... and then used FTP was able to update the football scores and all the punters rejoiced (which back then was small numbers, but big for the day eg. 50k people).

The farmers place where we stayed - the contraption hooked up to their phone for hours amused the farmer... making strange sounds ... during the final update the farmers wife picked up another phone extension and broke the connection. I did not know it and thought I failed and went to get a final late night cup of tea - and the farmers wife told me! so I retried again and all worked.

I think curl was v3 something ... I appreciated given my 'desperate hacker' moment that curl source code existed, was easy to read and I was able to make work. That appreciation and usage continues to this day.