Another pointless number that happens to be round and look nice so I feel a need to highlight it.

When curl was born WiFi didn’t exist yet. Smartphones and tablets weren’t invented. Other things that didn’t exist include YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Firefox, Chrome, Spotify, Google search, Wikipedia, Windows 98 or emojis.

curl was born in a different time, but also in the beginning of the explosion of the web and Internet Protocols. Just before the big growth wave.

In 1996 when I started working on the precursor to curl, there were around 250,000 web sites (sources vary slightly)..

In 1998 when curl shipped, the number of sites were already around 2,400,000. Ten times larger amount in just those two years.

In early 2020, the amount of web sites are around 1,700,000,000 to 2,000,000,000 (depending on who provides the stats). The number of web sites has thus grown at least 70,000% over curl’s 8000 days of life and perhaps as much as 8000 times the amount as when I first working with HTTP clients.