well a shell command if you can excuse my nitpicking. Had it been a bash script he wouldn't only have made a really nice easter egg but also found a security hole in curl.

you are right, I started out with piping it into less, to see if you are right and damn it if you are not right. I thought he did something with delays in the output. How and why does this work?

So are you saying that bash is not actually executed but the characters are being printed on the screen and they looks as if the animation were still playing?

What I cannot understand from that explanation is how the animation time works. It should display the animation in chunks, with really fast frames, followed by pauses while it waits for data to be received.