‘The first program I ever wrote was Cricinfo’ – Simon King

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‘The first program I ever wrote was Cricinfo’ – Simon King
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In the latest episode of the podcast we speak to two pioneers from the early days of the internet: Simon King, the founder of Cricinfo, and Vishal Misra, an early volunteer who was instrumental in the building of the database and streamlining live scoring.

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Talking Points:

  • The difficulty of getting cricket updates in the early 1990s
  • Chatrooms, IRC, and begging for score updates
  • The aggregation of cricket fans across North American universities
  • The idea for building a database that would store all cricket information
  • The early pioneers such as KS Rao and Murari Venkatraman
  • The evolution of the Cricinfo scorecard
  • Sending live updates from Malaysia, Kenya, and Bangladesh
  • Travis Basevi – the man who built a wonder-tool called statsguru
  • Vishal’s memories from the 1996 World Cup – when live scoring took off
  • The day cricinfo’s server crashed in Oregon

Participants:

Siddhartha Vaidyanathan (@sidvee)

Simon King

Vishal Misra (@vishalmisra)

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Related:

  • ESPNcricinfo at 20 years – ESPNcricinfo
  • One night in 1996 – Vishal Misra – ESPNcricinfo
  • The wizard Elz – Siddhartha Vaidyanathan – ESPNcricinfo
  • Travis Basevi, my friend who changed the way cricket was consumed – Vishal Misra – ESPNcricinfo
  • Travis Basevi: the Statsguru visionary who transformed cricket – Tanya Aldred – Guardian
  • Cricinfo – How it all began – Rohan Chandran
  • A bot called Cricinfo – Badri Sheshadri – ESPNcricinfo
  • The Cricinfo story –  Hosted by Gautam Govitrikar – YouTube

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Lead image from Wikimedia Commons.


One thought on “‘The first program I ever wrote was Cricinfo’ – Simon King”

  1. Thank you for this discussion. As an IT professional who was learning in the early ’90s this echoes so much of my experience with Unix/Linux, IRC, Perl and so much more.

    Cricinfo has been and is the essential cricket website.

    Well done.

    I’m sorry to hear of the passing of Travis who played such a large part.

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