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

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.