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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

curl developer, Daniel Stenberg, has written a blog post about 30 Years of Internet Transfers with curl [daniel.haxx.se].

The average internet connection speed of a normal household in Sweden, where I lived and I still live, in 1996 was 30 kbps. 30 kilobit per second. This was before v90 came and bumped the modems up to 56 kilobits. Ordinary mortals connected to the internet using modems over their single phone lines. Today, the average Swedish connection speed is 200 megabits/second.

Thirty years ago there were just 36 million global Internet users and 250,000 websites. Compared to the 6 or 7 billion users and 1 billion websites of today.

We used simpler protocols and while encrypted protocols like SSL existed, they were not used a lot and only for a few rare sites.

Daniel, now in his mid-50s, plans to continue working on curl for the foreseeable future.

Previously:
(2025) Curl Project Founder Snaps over Deluge of Time-Sucking AI Slop Bug Reports [soylentnews.org]
(2024) cURL User Survey 2024 Analysis [soylentnews.org]
(2024) The I in LLM Stands for Intelligence [soylentnews.org]
(2023) "cURL", the URL Code That Can, Marks 25 Years of Transfers [soylentnews.org]
(2018) HTTP/3 Explained: A Work in Progress [soylentnews.org]
(2018) Daniel Stenberg, Author of cURL and libcurl, Denied US Visit Again [soylentnews.org]
(2018) Twenty Years of cURL on March 20, 2018 [soylentnews.org]
(2018) Reducing Year 2038 Problems in curl [soylentnews.org]

Original Submission