I am pretty sure wget existed before curl, insofar as I remember people back in the day talking about curl being a newer/better version of wget. From my limited

I am pretty sure wget existed before curl, insofar as I remember people back in the day talking about curl being a newer/better version of wget. From my limited usage it didn't seem like a better version because I had to remember a bunch of switches to get it to just download the file which wget already did out of the box, but somehow it became the industry standard anyway, perhaps because of the more permissive license. I don't have any particular complaints with it either, although I still always forget the switches I need to do to make it download a file instead of print a bunch of stuff to stdout. Oh well.