WhereIsAtlas · Software
cURL
Still here — the small Swedish download tool from 1996 that now moves data inside almost everything connected
Active — This is a rare entry for a registry of vanished things: cURL never went away. Created in 1996 by Daniel Stenberg and still led by him, the command-line tool and its libcurl library are among the most widely installed pieces of software in the world — quietly moving data inside browsers, phones, cars, televisions, appliances and servers.
cURL began in 1996 as a side project by Daniel Stenberg, a Swedish developer and author. It started life as httpget, a small command-line program written to fetch currency exchange rates for users of an internet relay chat bot, using nothing but a URL. Stenberg renamed it curl — a play on "see URL" — released it as free software, and kept going.
The decision that made it ubiquitous came in 2000, when the project split its transfer engine into a reusable library: libcurl. Instead of only offering a tool that people ran in a terminal, curl could now be embedded inside other programs, which is why it is effectively invisible today. An application that needs to fetch a web page, upload a file or talk to an API links libcurl and gets years of protocol work for free, while a developer who needs to test the same request simply types curl at a shell prompt.
The scope of the project grew far beyond fetching a page. curl speaks a long list of protocols — HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 among them, plus FTP, SFTP, SCP, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP, MQTT and more — and runs under a permissive, MIT/X-style licence that lets companies embed it in commercial products without paying or asking. Microsoft began shipping curl.exe as part of Windows in 2018, and libcurl has ridden along inside countless phones, set-top boxes, televisions, cars and server stacks, usually with no visible credit.
By the project's 25th anniversary in 2023, Stenberg estimated that curl had been installed more than ten billion times, across a code base that has grown well past a hundred thousand lines. Releases still arrive on a roughly eight-week cycle, security problems are published and patched in the open, and Stenberg remains the lead maintainer — while also warning publicly about the strain of sustaining critical open-source infrastructure that nearly everyone depends on and almost nobody funds directly.
So the answer to "what happened to curl" is unusual for this registry. Nothing happened. It was never acquired, never abandoned and never needed a revival. It became plumbing — the kind of software you only think about when it breaks.
Quick facts
- Created
- 1996, by Daniel Stenberg
- First name
- httpget, renamed curl in 1997
- Key decision
- libcurl, the embeddable transfer library, added in 2000
- Protocols
- HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, FTP, SFTP, SCP, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP, MQTT and more
- Licence
- Free and permissive (MIT/X-style), so anyone can embed it
- Scale
- More than ten billion installations estimated by its 25th anniversary in 2023
- Ships with
- Windows 10 and 11 since 2018, plus phones, cars, TVs and servers
- Maintainer
- Daniel Stenberg, still the lead developer
- Today
- Actively maintained, released on a roughly eight-week cycle
Sources
- cURL - Wikipedia — Wikipedia (2026-09-15)
- FOSSified: curl 25 years — Daniel Stenberg (2026-09-15)
- curl project history — curl on GitHub (2026-09-15)
- curl mailing list archive — curl.se (2026-09-15)