Oh man, the memories.<p>For people who have grown up in a hyper-connected always-online world, it's hard to explain the pure <i>joy</i> of hearing the sound of your computer picking up the phone and sending those tones [0]. Because it meant going from isolated, disconnected and unitary to being part of a wider world.<p>Suddenly, everything was at your fingertips and it was intoxicating to me as a teenager. Fire up Trumpet Winsock and dial into the local mom and pop ISP. Suddenly you're surfing the early web using Netscape. Or open up WinVN and read some newsgroups. Or spend way, way too many hours playing MUDs (seriously, I think I spent almost every night MUDding during my teenage years).<p>Or learning cool HTML tricks by looking at the source of a page (back when pages were simple and you could tell things by looking at the source). Some of my earliest exposure to "programming" was because I wanted to make cool web things on my 1mb of ISP provided web space.<p>So yes, thank you Trumpet Winsock. Without you my formative years would have been very different and I likely wouldn't be in the career I'm in now.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured...</a>
> <i>Do you remember connecting to the Internet in 1994 or 1995?</i><p>In 1993 I was already using Linux, with an actual TCP/IP stack, not some bolted-on thing. In 1994 I was doing <i>contract work</i> on Linux already. One of the jobs was for these guys, still chugging along:<p><a href="http://www.infomine.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.infomine.com/</a><p>They employed a group of full-time people who continuously gathered new information about mining prospecting going on around the world, stuffing it into a database. This was turned into periodically refreshed web pages, for which subscribers could "click to pay". I hacked the CERN httpd to lock the click-to-pay data, and whipped up a billing system for invoicing customers. (Spat out TeX -> dvi -> laserjet: most beautiful invoices anyone ever got for anything.) I made a nice visual control menu for the whole system using a C program and ncurses, and even Yacc was used on the project for something.<p>One of the genius programmers on the database side claimed that "OMG, Linux causes data loss", because when the hundreds of megs of generated HTML was copied over to the servers (Linux ext2 FS), the disk usage was way lower than on the FAT. Haha!<p>In 1995 I got an Asus motherboard with two Pentium 100 processors, and ran Linux 1.3.x with early SMP support (big kernel lock heavily used). make -j 3 was only 27% faster than make.
I wonder how much of his programming know-how could be attributed to the high school curriculum.<p>In the 1970s Tasmania was the best equipped Australian state for computer based subjects. A lot of the schools had terminals to a central computer[1]. Buses, I/O devices and assembler topics were covered as early as year 9 levels.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSTS/E" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSTS/E</a>
I have fond memories of the transition from local BBSes (my parents were annoyed enough by my constant phoning of the local BBS to download commander keen and the like), to IP connectivity via Trumpet. The reach of the internet (esp IRC!) was mind-blowing for someone living in a relatively isolated community in Alaska at the time.<p>I feel like I don't fully appreciate the gradual transition from dial-up and Trumpet to LTE and a supercomputer in my pocket :) I wonder what people born today will experience that has as great of an impact.
When I set that site up in 2011, it was really heart-warming how many people rallied around and chipped in.<p>It's doubly nostalgic to see it here again, 5 years later.<p>Edit: and there's still room on that donors page for any companies wanting to chip in something substantial.<p>Edit 2: <i>5</i> years, not 4.
In 1995 I was an expert in setting up Trumpet Winsock, paid to consult on its installation and configuration - even though I had never once installed it myself.<p>That is to say, I was a tech support lackey, answering the phones and talking to dozens of dialup ISP users daily.<p>It was a small company, and of the three techs there, none of us were Windows users - two Linux, one Mac. Someone had helpfully printed screenshots of Winsock's various dialog boxes and taped them up around our cubicle. It was enough.
I was using an Amiga with the Miami TCP stack back then, which I paid for. My first Windows machine had Windows 95, which had networking built-in. But, I'm happy that some folks have made good on their shareware obligations. Writing software was a lot more difficult back then...I sometimes can't believe anything ever got done before we had the Internet to research things (and I know I personally was a much less effective developer before the Internet).
Here's the author's story, the making of:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283693" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283693</a><p>Hint: from scratch, reading RFCs, in Turbo Pascal, as a part of his internet newsreader project!<p>Also, <a href="http://petertattam.com" rel="nofollow">http://petertattam.com</a> is down currently, but<p><a href="http://www.trumpet.com.au" rel="nofollow">http://www.trumpet.com.au</a><p>Works.
I had a PC Shop in 1995-1997 we sold copies of a software product called Internet in a Box. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_a_Box" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_a_Box</a><p>I think it competed with Trumpet Winsock. He had clients who used Trumpet Winsock but had problems configuring it so we helped them out.<p>It was later on with Windows 95 OSR2 that IE was bundled with it and it had a Winsock Dial Up Network stack that Internet in a Box and Winsock lost a lot of sales. I think they sold MSN subscriptions with it.<p>AOL and Compuserve competed with sending out free floppy disks and later on CD-ROMs. Then there was that $500 Internet rebate that made a PC basically free but had a $35/month dial up ISP bill to pay for it for five years.<p>But I remember people registering Trumpet Winsock for $25 and then choosing a mom and pop ISP. Trumpet Winsock was downloaded from a BBS, and was shareware and some ISPS gave out copies of it on a floppy disk when people signed up for service.
In 94 I got a job (my first in London) at a small company that made software with and for SGI workstations, and despite all this computational power they still used a 386 with Trumpet on Windows for their only internet connection.<p>It would dial up a few times a day to exchange email using Demon's inbound SMTP (tenner-a-month account!), or one could laboriously route through it if one really needed something specific.<p>In summer 1995 they replaced it with an ISDN line.
And also thanks to Russell Nelson, who maintained the best collection of ethernet card packet drivers for many years -- if you wanted to connect a DOS machine to an IP ethernet network, that was your best option. Probably still is.<p>Looks like he still has that up at <a href="http://www.crynwr.com/drivers/" rel="nofollow">http://www.crynwr.com/drivers/</a>
My absolute earliest memory of going on the internet was my grade school librarian firing up Trumpet Winsock on some Windows 3.1 machine when I was in second grade (circa 1995). He navigated to nfl.com and then printed the website out.<p>I remember thinking "this is pointless" but went on to build my first web pages only a few years later (4th or 5th grade).
My startup [0] conducted the first, secure commercial transaction on the web in 1994. I have strong memories of taking people on the phone through the many steps of downloading Trumpet Winsock via ftp from Australia so that they could then install the NCSA Mosaic web browser. Thanks, Peter, for your essential work.<p>Here's a short video [1] Shopify released last month about the transaction, where I reference how hard it was at the time to get online.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/business/attention-shoppers-internet-is-open.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/business/attention-shopper...</a>
[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGyhA-DIYvg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGyhA-DIYvg</a>
I'm trying to remember "the" big FTP site back then. There was one in particular that was the "go to" site for, well, pretty much everything.<p>ftp.cdrom.com, metalab.unc.edu, sunsite.something, ...
My first experience with Trumpet WinSock was on a small project where the computer talked to some state of the art (at the time) network connected data acquisition devices. Coming from a Unix world at the time, the whole windows ecosystem and specially its networking felt stone age, ridiculously buggy and error prone. It quickly drove us back to the old SunOS and Silicon graphics Irix workstations.
I remember mine and my dad's first confusions at using the Internet. How could you do multiple things at the same time? Obviously, we were used to how BBSes worked and had no idea of TCP/IP at the time.. :-)
I really loved the Trumpet Winsock debug mode which clearly showed packet types, syns, acks and other details. Since that I've been familiar with IP networking.
Never work for free,we're not paying royalties to the ancestors of the inventors of the wheel.<p>Thanks for the free work,here are some stock options!<p>You're the lowly programmerz, I'm the IDEA GUY!
On a related/tangential note, here [1] is the website for terminate, the world's most powerful communications software.<p>1: <a href="http://www.terminate.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.terminate.com/</a>
Sorry, off-topic, but in recent months I cannot read "trumpet" without thinking of the sort of thing I saw on TV today. Winsock comes across as 'wind-sock'... also apt.