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)

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

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