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+                                  _   _ ____  _
+                              ___| | | |  _ \| |
+                             / __| | | | |_) | |
+                            | (__| |_| |  _ <| |___
+                             \___|\___/|_| \_\_____|
+
+How cURL Became Like This
+=========================
+
+Towards the end of 1996, Daniel Stenberg was spending time writing an IRC bot
+for an Amiga related channel on EFnet. He then came up with the idea to make
+currency-exchange calculations available to Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
+users. All the necessary data are published on the Web; he just needed to
+automate their retrieval.
+
+Daniel simply adopted an existing command-line open-source tool, httpget, that
+Brazilian Rafael Sagula had written and recently release version 0.1 of. After
+a few minor adjustments, it did just what he needed.
+
+1997
+----
+
+HttpGet 1.0 was released on April 8th 1997 with brand new HTTP proxy support.
+
+We soon found and fixed support for getting currencies over GOPHER.  Once FTP
+download support was added, the name of the project was changed and urlget 2.0
+was released in August 1997. The http-only days were already passed.
+
+1998
+----
+
+The project slowly grew bigger. When upload capabilities were added and the
+name once again was misleading, a second name change was made and on March 20,
+1998 curl 4 was released. (The version numbering from the previous names was
+kept.)
+
+(Unrelated to this project a company called Curl Corporation registered a US
+trademark on the name "CURL" on May 18 1998. That company had then already
+registered the curl.com domain back in November of the previous year. All this
+was revealed to us much later.)
+
+SSL support was added, powered by the SSLeay library.
+
+August, first announcement of curl on freshmeat.net.
+
+October, with the curl 4.9 release and the introduction of cookie support,
+curl was no longer released under the GPL license. Now we're at 4000 lines of
+code, we switched over to the MPL license to restrict the effects of
+"copyleft".
+
+November, configure script and reported successful compiles on several
+major operating systems. The never-quite-understood -F option was added and
+curl could now simulate quite a lot of a browser. TELNET support was added.
+
+Curl 5 was released in December 1998 and introduced the first ever curl man
+page. People started making Linux RPM packages out of it.
+
+1999
+----
+
+January, DICT support added.
+
+OpenSSL took over where SSLeay was abandoned.
+
+May, first Debian package.
+
+August, LDAP:// and FILE:// support added. The curl web site gets 1300 visits
+weekly. Moved site to curl.haxx.nu.
+
+Released curl 6.0 in September. 15000 lines of code.
+
+December 28, added the project on Sourceforge and started using its services
+for managing the project.
+
+2000
+----
+
+Spring 2000, major internal overhaul to provide a suitable library interface.
+The first non-beta release was named 7.1 and arrived in August. This offered
+the easy interface and turned out to be the beginning of actually getting
+other software and programs to get based on and powered by libcurl. Almost
+20000 lines of code.
+
+June 2000: the curl site moves to "curl.haxx.se"
+
+August, the curl web site gets 4000 visits weekly.
+
+The PHP guys adopted libcurl already the same month, when the first ever third
+party libcurl binding showed up. CURL has been a supported module in PHP since
+the release of PHP 4.0.2. This would soon get followers. More than 16
+different bindings exist at the time of this writing.
+
+September, kerberos4 support was added.
+
+In November started the work on a test suite for curl. It was later re-written
+from scratch again. The libcurl major SONAME number was set to 1.
+
+2001
+----
+
+January, Daniel released curl 7.5.2 under a new license again: MIT (or
+MPL). The MIT license is extremely liberal and can be used combined with GPL
+in other projects. This would finally put an end to the "complaints" from
+people involved in GPLed projects that previously were prohibited from using
+libcurl while it was released under MPL only. (Due to the fact that MPL is
+deemed "GPL incompatible".)
+
+curl supports HTTP 1.1 starting with the release of 7.7, March 22 2001. This
+also introduced libcurl's ability to do persistent connections. 24000 lines of
+code. The libcurl major SONAME number was bumped to 2 due to this overhaul.
+
+The first experimental ftps:// support was added in March 2001.
+
+August. curl is bundled in Mac OS X, 10.1. It was already becoming more and
+more of a standard utility of Linux distributions and a regular in the BSD
+ports collections. The curl web site gets 8000 visits weekly. Curl Corporation
+contacted Daniel to discuss "the name issue". After Daniel's reply, they have
+never since got in touch again.
+
+September, libcurl 7.9 introduces cookie jar and curl_formadd(). During the
+forthcoming 7.9.x releases, we introduced the multi interface slowly and
+without much whistles.
+
+2002
+----
+
+June, the curl web site gets 13000 visits weekly. curl and libcurl is
+35000 lines of code. Reported successful compiles on more than 40 combinations
+of CPUs and operating systems.
+
+To estimate number of users of the curl tool or libcurl library is next to
+impossible. Around 5000 downloaded packages each week from the main site gives
+a hint, but the packages are mirrored extensively, bundled with numerous OS
+distributions and otherwise retrieved as part of other software.
+
+September, with the release of curl 7.10 it is released under the MIT license
+only.
+
+2003
+----
+
+January. Started working on the distributed curl tests. The autobuilds.
+
+February, the curl site averages at 20000 visits weekly. At any given moment,
+there's an average of 3 people browsing the curl.haxx.se site.
+
+Multiple new authentication schemes are supported: Digest (May), NTLM (June)
+and Negotiate (June).
+
+November: curl 7.10.8 is released. 45000 lines of code. ~55000 unique visitors
+to the curl.haxx.se site. Five official web mirrors.
+
+December, full-fledged SSL for FTP is supported.
+
+2004
+----
+
+January: curl 7.11.0 introduced large file support.
+
+June: curl 7.12.0 introduced IDN support. 10 official web mirrors.
+
+This release bumped the major SONAME to 3 due to the removal of the
+curl_formparse() function
+
+August: Curl and libcurl 7.12.1
+
+    Public curl release number:               82
+    Releases counted from the very beginning: 109
+    Available command line options:           96
+    Available curl_easy_setopt() options:     120
+    Number of public functions in libcurl:    36
+    Amount of public web site mirrors:        12
+    Number of known libcurl bindings:         26
+
+2005
+----
+
+April. GnuTLS can now optionally be used for the secure layer when curl is
+built.
+
+September: TFTP support was added.
+
+More than 100,000 unique visitors of the curl web site. 25 mirrors.
+
+December: security vulnerability: libcurl URL Buffer Overflow
+
+2006
+----
+
+January. We dropped support for Gopher. We found bugs in the implementation
+that turned out having been introduced years ago, so with the conclusion that
+nobody had found out in all this time we removed it instead of fixing it.
+
+March: security vulnerability: libcurl TFTP Packet Buffer Overflow
+
+April: Added the multi_socket() API
+
+September: The major SONAME number for libcurl was bumped to 4 due to the
+removal of ftp third party transfer support.
+
+November: Added SCP and SFTP support
+
+2007
+----
+
+February: Added support for the Mozilla NSS library to do the SSL/TLS stuff
+
+July: security vulnerability: libcurl GnuTLS insufficient cert verification
+
+2008
+----
+
+November:
+
+    Command line options:         128
+    curl_easy_setopt() options:   158
+    Public functions in libcurl:  58
+    Known libcurl bindings:       37
+    Contributors:                 683
+
+ 145,000 unique visitors. >100 GB downloaded.
+
+2009
+----
+
+March: security vulnerability: libcurl Arbitrary File Access
+
+August: security vulnerability: libcurl embedded zero in cert name
+
+December: Added support for IMAP, POP3 and SMTP
+
+2010
+----
+
+January: Added support for RTSP
+
+February: security vulnerability: libcurl data callback excessive length
+
+March: The project switched over to use git (hosted by github) instead of CVS
+for source code control
+
+May: Added support for RTMP
+
+Added support for PolarSSL to do the SSL/TLS stuff
+
+August:
+
+    Public curl releases:         117
+    Command line options:         138
+    curl_easy_setopt() options:   180
+    Public functions in libcurl:  58
+    Known libcurl bindings:       39
+    Contributors:                 808
+
+ Gopher support added (re-added actually)
+
+2012
+----
+
+ July: Added support for Schannel (native Windows TLS backend) and Darwin SSL
+ (Native Mac OS X and iOS TLS backend).
+
+ Supports metalink
+
+ October: SSH-agent support.
+
+2013
+----
+
+ February: Cleaned up internals to always uses the "multi" non-blocking
+ approach internally and only expose the blocking API with a wrapper.
+
+ September: First small steps on supporting HTTP/2 with nghttp2.
+
+ October: Removed krb4 support.
+
+ December: Happy eyeballs.
+
+2014
+----
+
+ March: first real release supporting HTTP/2
+
+ September: Web site had 245,000 unique visitors and served 236GB data