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

81 All Out - A Cricket Podcast

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