Wednesday, June 18, 2008

CricInfo - the early history

Most cricket fans who are "online" don't need any introduction to CricInfo - the mother and father of all cricket websites, "The Home of Cricket on the Internet", as it has called itself for a decade and half now. It's a treasure trove of cricketana - live scores & commentary, reporting on cricket matches, articles, profiles, statistics, you name it. In fact the richness of its collection has made it somewhat hard to discover the hidden gems... most users probably use only a few regular features from its front page, never knowing what they're missing.

What makes CricInfo even more interesting, and perhaps a case study for business schools, is its origins. David Liverman has written up a very nice - and mostly accurate - history of CricInfo, which is definitely worth a read. In this post, and subsequent ones, I'll try and relive my little role in the setting up of CricInfo.

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I was a graduate student in Minneapolis during the 1990s. Our only sources of cricket news in those days were (week-old) Indian newspapers, and the Usenet newsgroup rec.sport.cricket, where some folks from England and Australia would post updates for the benefit of those like myself, stranded in cricket-blackout places like the US of A. We also used to hang out on IRC (Internet Relay Chat, one of the earliest instant-messaging systems), on a channel or "chat-room" called #cricket - hoping that someone from the cricket-enabled world would log on and give us score updates. On a lucky day, one of these kind souls would actually type in ball-by-ball commentary for us while watching a game on TV. Soon the word spread and IRC #cricket attracted hundreds of people, all clamouring for scores and updates the moment they joined the channel! We ended up having to make it a moderated channel with only the "commentators" allowed to write to it, and had another channel called #crickettalk for the masses to use for discussion, score requests, etc.

One of those IRC hangers-on was Simon King - whose IRC nickname flitted between ColdPom, CoolPom and occasionally even WarmPom depending on the Minnesota weather! For like myself, he too was at the University of Minnesota, as a post-doctoral fellow in the Chemical Engineering department. Simon was somewhat irritated at the constant clamouring for scores and scorecards on IRC - well, so were many of us regulars, but he actually did something about it. Simon himself had no computer science / programming background, but with the help of friends on IRC like Mandar Mirashi, he created the first incarnation of CricInfo - a "bot" on IRC. This was a program that would join the #cricket channel with the nickname CricInfo. You could send it a private message over IRC, asking for the latest scorecard etc. using a very limited language of keywords. In response, the CricInfo bot would send you the scorecard as a private message - thus avoiding cluttering up the #cricket channel itself with all these requests and responses.

Now where would CricInfo get its scorecard from? CricInfo the bot was simply a program running on Simon's workstation at the University of Minnesota. Simon had to keep a scorecard (a simple text file) updated on that machine, by watching the ball-by-ball commentary on IRC. Since it was impossible for one person to do that through the duration of a cricket game, some of us volunteered to help. One of us would log into the CricInfo account and keep the scorecard updated - not quite ball-to-ball perhaps, but pretty frequently. Thus we ended up forming a community of volunteers, all recruited from amongst the IRC #cricket regulars, who helped by creating the content for CricInfo to "serve". Soon, this went beyond the latest scorecard. We started populating CricInfo with older scorecards, match reports and even the Laws of the game, all painstakingly typed out from print references like the Wisden Almanack, Sportstar magazine, etc.

So, in its early days, CricInfo was only available on IRC using a very limited command language. It had a relatively small user base - only those who were aware of IRC and CricInfo, and were sufficiently comfortable with using that command language to request files from the IRC bot. CricInfo the bot would keep statistics on its usage, and I remember we rejoiced when the usage touched 1000 requests in a week. This must've been in early 1993. Still, even this level of usage couldn't be sustained on that workstation in Minnesota - it was apparently using too much network bandwidth, and Simon was requested by his system administrator to shut CricInfo down! Luckily, one of those IRC regulars, Prof. K.S. Rao offered us the use of a PC (an 80386-based machine!) in his office at the North Dakota State University. So CricInfo moved to tulip.ee.ndsu.nodak.edu, and we breathed a sigh of relief.

Meanwhile, I had become aware of a distributed information system called gopher - created incidentally at the University of Minnesota by some of its IT administrators. This was a precursor of "the web", much like the http-based web servers that were to follow soon. Around that time, many US academic institutions had installed gopher servers, making information available online through simple text menus. A gopher client (a browser, in today's terms) could connect to any of those servers, navigate the menus, and access files containing mostly text-based information. This seemed like the ideal interface for CricInfo, and I downloaded the gopher software onto Prof. Rao's machine and installed it atop the same directory structure that the IRC bot used. At one stroke, all those scorecards and articles that we'd been accumulating became available via gopher clients.

I "advertised" the new gopher interface by posting an article to the rec.sport.cricket newsgroup. Within days, the usage of CricInfo had exploded - apparently, many more people had gopher clients available than IRC clients. Also gopher was more friendly with bandwidth usage than IRC, and its response times were much quicker. So it quickly became very popular.

By now we had a motley collection of volunteers helping run CricInfo, doing all sorts of tasks - maintaining live scorecards, typing in older scorecards, keeping the 386 machine running (not an easy task with the load imposed on it), answering user queries at a "help desk" email address, etc. We called ourselves "The Management", rather grandly! Most of us were in academic institutions in the US, UK and Australia, either as students, post-docs or faculty. We "met" and talked to each other only on IRC and email - very rarely in person or even on the phone. As an example, Simon King and I have met just once (over lunch at a campus restaurant), despite being on the same university campus, and in adjacent buildings in fact! CricInfo was thus an almost purely online, collaborative venture.

One of these volunteers, Sridhar Venkataraman (at Arizona State Univ), had been playing around with this thing called an http server, and was raving about it. He and I chatted about it on IRC, and I tried it out as well. It seemed to be very similar to gopher at the time, except for the cool new thing called "hyperlinks" and the ability to embed images in text documents! We discussed it with the CricInfo Management. Given the kind of content we had - plain text scorecards, articles etc. - we decided that we didn't want to mess around with this http thingy! Gopher was doing just fine, thank you, and we had no use for these hyperlinks and images! Zero marks for foresight, I guess :-) Of course at that time, most of our users already had gopher clients installed on their workstations, and hardly anyone had http clients available. That was to change soon, and quickly. People had started playing around with lynx (a text-based http client) and then came mosaic, the graphical browser by Marc Andreesen that really launched the web revolution. Soon enough, Sridhar helped set up the CricInfo http server, and the rest, as they say, is history :-)

22 comments:

The Livermans of St. John's said...

Neeran nice to read your take on the early days, glad my history is mostly accurate in your opinion!

Neeran Karnik said...

Dave! Nice to "hear" from you.

"Mostly accurate" probably equals 99.9%, don't worry! One correction is that Simon and I did meet once.

Now that the memory is starting to go, I wouldn't trust it over yours anyway :)

Fowler said...

Well do you have any idea from where can we get that cricinfo bot?

Neeran Karnik said...

@Fowler: Hmm, I home someone has "preserved" it as a historical artefact! I'll have to check with Simon King or try and locate Mandar Mirashi who wrote the early version.

Simon King said...

Hello VKF! Nice job on the early history and well done Dave on the bluwiki version - it's a stunning piece of work. Concerning the bot: Yes, I have it somewhere. On http: you're right in that we initially discounted it. I'm trying to remember however when we did adopt it? A trawl of r.s.c. should reveal that. I'm going to guess it was mid 94.

Simon King said...

OK, so I was a year off! WWW was launched on was Aug 31st 1995. See http://groups.google.com/group/rec.sport.cricket/browse_thread/thread/caccb645f8b2c631/b9e7750170089309?q=cricinfo#b9e7750170089309

Neeran Karnik said...

@Simon: CP! Good to hear from you. Could you please try and find the bot code, and put it up somewhere on the web (like in Google docs or something)?

The Livermans of St. John's said...

CP!! great to hear from you and glad you found the bluewiki history at least partially accurate. At one point I thought it should become a book but then realized I alone could not tell what really is an interesting story..

Neeran Karnik said...

Dave, a book sounds like a great idea! We should try writing it collaboratively on the web, mirroring Cricinfo itself! Although it's of course much easier to collaborate on the web these days...

Simon King said...

A book would be a good plan imho. My email is the same, so please drop me a line when ur ready :)
the bot code is in the UK so it'll have to wait until I next get over there I'm afraid. FWIW, Mandar wrote a generic bot shell which I adapted to create the first CricInfo bot.

ViralEpidemus said...

Hiya Neeran,

I was sitting today and searching for the early history of cricinfo...:)

It is amazing to see it "evolve" from one avatar to another as newer technologies became available. Amazing how some of these things just get "taken over" and super-flated on the web ...

Yes, a book is definitely on the cards... title : "Cloudy days :) :)".

NR

ViralEpidemus said...

Ofcourse, it would have been an entirely different matter altogether if you guys had secured some funding from maybe a venture wing of Minnesota and struck it out on your own. I guess, thats where the MBAs cumin, huh?

Cud have returned from your sabbatical as billionaires to finish whatever academics you had set out to achieve.... :) :)

NR

Neeran Karnik said...

@NR: Although CI has a presence on Facebook, and maybe Twitter, it might soon need to evolve for catering to the 'real-time' stream generation. It's still a web destination.

As for the book, "Cloudy days" might seem like something to do with cloud computing, and there are enough books being written on that topic :) Besides, Minnesota was hardly cloudy, even in winter!

If we'd let the MBA types into CricInfo, they would've been the one walking out with the billions, we would've gone back to our research... oops, isn't that what happened in reality anyway? :-)

MmmmYah said...

Ha nice work Neeran .. it's kinda fun to recall the "before the world wide web" days!!! Great to see some old timers on here (Hi ColdPom!). I'll definitely read the book. I wonder why Fowler wants the Cricinfo bot... he better watch out before Creakoot kicks him off #cricket :-)

- Mandar (Mmmm)

Neeran Karnik said...

@Mmmm: Thanks Mandar, and good to reconnect with you...

Jeff Green said...

I have, in principle, it's on a very old PC, a copy of many incarnations of the CI bot, there should also be an archive of #cricket and #ci for several years on the same machine, but I'd have to work out which old PC and how to make it work ...

Simon King said...

Great to see Mmmm on here! Hello Mandar. It looks like CI is considering doing something on its history, 20 years on. For those of you who weren't there back then, CI was "born" on March 2nd 1993, which is when I registered the name with nickserv and started adapting Mandar's bot code.
You can never say never of course, but there are only two people without whom CricInfo would never have existed in the first place. Mandar is one of them.

There are of course numerous people without whom CricInfo would never have grown and/or survived and several of them, such as Neeran, are here (launching the gopher interface was inspired, and yes, I remember the first 1000 access week. I wonder if those access logs are still on CI... btw, you forgot the email and direct telnet interfaces :-).

One of the least recognised is David Richards, former CEO of the ICC, who along with Michael Watt was instrumental in CI's transition and survival in the early days of the commercial internet and growth to become the official web site of every cricket board on the planet for a brief period right before 2001 crash. It was a process we started with Zim and RSA in 1996.
Simon (CP)

P.S. The wikipedia entry on CI is really inaccurate (e.g. CI started in 1993, not 92). You were actually there, Neeran and your blog fits with my memory of events too.

MmmmYah said...

Ha you are too kind Simon.. all I did was give you a start and a little push back in the day and it took a life of its own :-)

You know what's strange? I had faded off IRC for the past 5-8 years thanks to the new social media contraptions. However I have experienced an IRC revival of sorts from the Bitcoin movement .. much like I did with the Undernet and Cricinfo in general.. it's the same nascent excitement for a new technology. :-) I wonder how that will turn out 20 years from now.. stay in touch!

vindev said...

wow, this post is awesome and to see all you guys here is great. I was a leacher at #cricinfo never bothered to contribute but I was 13 then so you cant blame me :) . Its really inspiring to see the guys who were running it..

I am trying to access this link http://bluwiki.com/go/CricInfo_History but the text seems all garbelled..

Neeran Karnik said...

Vindev,

Thanks... And yes, I'm seeing garbled text at the bluwiki site too. Will try and contact Dave Liverman to see if that can be fixed.

bakait said...

Hi VKFan and guests (Dave, CP, Mmmm) ... happened upon this blog while googling.

After Creakoot and before CricInfo, there was another bot on #cricket: Crickoot.

Those were the days!

Neeran Karnik said...

Bakait! Good to see you here. Yes indeed, those were the days...