Editing Wget (section)

==History==
Wget descends from an earlier program named Geturl by the same author,<ref name="2007-newsfile" /> the development of which commenced in late 1995. The name changed to Wget after the author became aware of an earlier [[Amiga]] program named GetURL, written by James Burton in [[AREXX]].

Wget filled a gap in the inconsistent web-downloading software available in the mid-1990s. No single program could reliably use both [[HTTP]] and [[File Transfer Protocol|FTP]] to download files. Existing programs either supported FTP (such as [[NcFTP]] and dl) or were written in [[Perl]], which was not yet ubiquitous. While Wget was inspired by features of some of the existing programs, it supported both HTTP and FTP and could be built using only the standard development tools found on every Unix system.

At that time many Unix users struggled behind extremely slow university and [[Dial-up access|dial-up]] [[Internet]] connections, leading to a growing need for a downloading agent that could deal with transient network failures without assistance from the human operator.