8 ms·

Thanks for Trumpet Winsock

415 points by wooby 11y ago

jacques_chester 11y ago
When I set that site up in 2011, it was really heart-warming how many people rallied around and chipped in. It's doubly nostalgic to see it here again, 5 years later. Edit: and there's still room on that donors page for any companies wanting to chip in something substantial. Edit 2: 5 years, not 4.
- mahmud 11y ago
  Good on ya, Jacques.
- kristianp 11y ago
  I'm interested in how much is being donated. Do you have any plans of releasing some stats?
  - orf 11y ago
    I would be interested as well, it seems like the site should have been updated since then. Also I wonder what percentage of donations are a result of links to HN/reddit/social media rather than organic?
    - jacques_chester 11y ago
      Almost all of what are technically post-payments came from HN and Reddit links. On a normal day the site gets about 10 visits. In the last 9 hours it's had about 17k.
  - jacques_chester 11y ago
    I think Peter would be amenable to it, I'll ask.
  - jacques_chester 11y ago
    In the past 24 hours, according to Peter, "US$4458 less fees of US$178.32 in 78 payments. two large ones. $2000 and $500."
peckrob 11y ago
Oh man, the memories. For people who have grown up in a hyper-connected always-online world, it's hard to explain the pure joy 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. 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). 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. 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. [0] http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured...
- gww 11y ago
  Wow, MUDs I have not thought about the one I spent my teenage years playing until you mentioned them. I just checked and to my surprise it is still online. Too bad it looks like no one plays anymore.
  - peckrob 11y ago
    Some of my best computer memories of that era are from playing various MUDs, and even 20+ years later I still keep up with some of the friends I met playing MUDs during those years. Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still around. I still connect every so often and chat with folks, maybe do a little light RP. Some of those same friends I've been playing with, on and off, for since the early to mid 90s. Even though we're scattered all over the world, it feels like we grew up together. I suppose, we kinda did. It always struck me odd that MUD playership kinda died off, seeing as how there are many many more people using the Internet now than there were in the 90s. Even accounting for cultural changes and technology moving on, I would have guessed that be enough new people interested in the old ways to keep the population at least level, but alas that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm glad I got to be a part of that era.
jeff_marshall 11y ago
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. 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.
- api 11y ago
  I remember the first time I did the email around the world trick. Back then you could telnet to port 25 and type in a smtp header with a source route and send an email that would bounce across a dozen mail servers as it circumnavigated the globe. Fun times.
  - jeff_marshall 11y ago
    Yes! I did the telnet thing to mail servers while I was in high school to good effect ;). I would almost certainly cringe if I could see those mails today. Showing the school IT department what could be done with a semicolon in a URL on their servers would have gotten me suspended if it weren't for some understanding teachers. Thank god I only put a fork bomb (cringe of 2016 me is real) in there.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- samstave 11y ago
  Heh. "local" -- ~1988 I was calling into BBSs in San Jose from Tahoe... the phone bill got to $926! I was grounded for a month. We wanted to play trade wars and the pit. Super fun. I also used to call up 411 (information, where you would call 411 and say "do you have a number for John Smith in lake tahoe ca?") -- and I would chat up the 411 operators for as long as possible - the contest being to see how long we could keep the op on the phone. Then I tried to make blue boxes.
SwellJoe 11y ago
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).
- bashinator 11y ago
  > Miami TCP stack back then, which I paid for. Yeah, this whole thread brought back how TCP/IP and dialup stacks used to be commercial. Huge win for the BSD license if you ask me.
orionblastar 11y ago
I had a PC Shop in 1995-1997 we sold copies of a software product called Internet in a Box. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_a_Box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_a_Box I think it competed with Trumpet Winsock. He had clients who used Trumpet Winsock but had problems configuring it so we helped them out. 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. 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. 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.
rmason 11y ago
I met Peter at BBSCon down in Tampa in 1995. A really humble guy and truly one of the nets pioneers.
cyanbane 11y ago
Color boxes, Phreaking, ASCII art groups, zips broken up at 1.44m, LOTD and other door games. That was my youth. Donation sent.
- caf 11y ago
  Wasn't it "LORD" (Legend Of the Red Dragon)?
  - zwetan 11y ago
    more like LOD for Legion of Doom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_Doom_(hacking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_Doom_(hacking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil
  - lotharbot 11y ago
    He might also be thinking of a variation of "Land of Devastation" (http://www.smbaker.com/games/land-of-devastation-classic http://www.smbaker.com/games/land-of-devastation-classic )
  - cyanbane 11y ago
    It was LORD. Not sure why I wrote LOTD.
jacquesm 11y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=p_trumpet https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=p_trumpet
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  Most of his comments were from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875 FWIW, you should not use Paypal donations. Use payments instead. Otherwise that account will probably get locked again.
  - csense 11y ago
    > FWIW, you should not use Paypal FTFY. Someone should really hook this guy up with a Bitcoin address...
sengork 11y ago
I wonder how much of his programming know-how could be attributed to the high school curriculum. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSTS/E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSTS/E
kentf 11y ago
Instead of PayPal, let's use Tilt for this. It's free and a YC company. I am happy to set it up, unless someone else wants to.
bks 11y ago
I ran an ISP that used trumpet, before Windows 95 and it was way better than my SLIP account. Donation already sent! Thank you.
gethoht 11y ago
Donated $50 now that I have the cash. I did not have the money back when I was 12 and first getting into computing. Cheers to winsock.
smallreader 11y ago
This is great but should be tagged (2011).
emmanueloga_ 11y ago
On a related/tangential note, here [1] is the website for terminate, the world's most powerful communications software. 1: http://www.terminate.com/ http://www.terminate.com/
- hyperdunc 11y ago
  Haha thanks for that it sparked some memories. I used Terminate to connect to local BBSs and even set one up myself using Remote Access, which was a BBS software package. Before setting it up I printed the manual out on my old dot matrix and it took hundreds of pages.
- efdee 11y ago
  Ah Terminate. You made me happy when Telix failed me.
matthucke 11y ago
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. That is to say, I was a tech support lackey, answering the phones and talking to dozens of dialup ISP users daily. 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.
- vidarh 11y ago
  I co-founded a small ISP, and had the same experience - I used AmigaOS and Linux, and had only ever seen screenshots of Trumpet Winsock but knew the confguration far better than I'd like...
- crb 11y ago
  There was (and still is!) a great web site for this, letting you see where the various "Dial Up Networking" screens were in Windows: http://www.chasms.com/ http://www.chasms.com/
  - steve-howard 11y ago
    What an amazing site. I was clicking through the advanced IPv4 settings on Windows 10 and clicking through the simulator for Windows XP and saw that they were exactly the same, beyond the different OS themes. So much overhaul for what network configuration looked like over the years, and the parts for experts are now deeply buried but unchanged.
tyingq 11y ago
Similarly, thanks KA9Q & WATTCP. Oh, and Kermit too.
aheilbut 11y ago
I always thought Netmanage Chameleon worked better.
marpstar 11y ago
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. I remember thinking "this is pointless" but went on to build my first web pages only a few years later (4th or 5th grade).
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  You just reminded me... I recently discovered that a website I made when I was a teenager is still online. I could still remember my username, was able to login, and was shocked to see the date stamps on the directory listing. The oldest file there is dated 19 May 1997 [0]. I intend to celebrate its 20th birthday in another ~16 months. [0]: There's actually one slightly older (28 Apr 1997), but it's an image (.gif), not a .html file.
sandworm101 11y ago
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.
kazinator 11y ago
> Do you remember connecting to the Internet in 1994 or 1995? In 1993 I was already using Linux, with an actual TCP/IP stack, not some bolted-on thing. In 1994 I was doing contract work on Linux already. One of the jobs was for these guys, still chugging along: http://www.infomine.com/ http://www.infomine.com/ 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. 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! 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.
- Tepix 11y ago
  Same here. I hardly used Trumpet Winsock because using first 386BSD 0.0 and later Linux was just the better way to get online :-) I still think it's great that Trumpet Winsock was around though. The more people on the internet, the merrier. Who knows if the internet would be everywhere today if the Windows users had been left out.
  - adventured 11y ago
    > Who knows if the internet would be everywhere today if the Windows users had been left out I can answer that for you: yes, it would be. The value proposition is among the greatest that has existed in all of human history. The hardware was ready, the price was low enough, nothing was going to stop it; lack of a layperson standard mass-consumer OS would have just slowed it down briefly until one was inevitably created.
    - 11y ago
jlgaddis 11y ago
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. ftp.cdrom.com, metalab.unc.edu, sunsite.something, ...
- yaowenjiaozi 11y ago
  cica cica indiana
  - jlgaddis 11y ago
    Oh, I'd forgotten about cica.cica.indiana.edu... kinda ironic since I'm only a couple of miles away from where it lived. You also reminded me of "The Usenet Oracle" (later, "The Internet Oracle" [0][1]) which also lived at IU. [0]: http://internetoracle.org/ http://internetoracle.org/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Oracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Oracle
- yaowenjiaozi 11y ago
  cica cica indiana
- IvyMike 11y ago
  wuarchive.wustl.edu
- muppetman 11y ago
  tucows?
- mammo 11y ago
  sunsite.unc.edu?
  - jlgaddis 11y ago
    That's it
- dugmartin 11y ago
  simtel?
justin_vanw 11y ago
Donated just now, wish there was a way to give 20 years of compound interest along with it :(
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tomcam 11y ago
I paid $25 around 1993 but I sure got my money's worth and then some--so tonight I kicked in another $38 gratefully.
sangnoir 11y ago
Moderators: shouldn't the title have a (2011) at the end? That is when it was authored.
seattlesbest 11y ago
Never work for free,we're not paying royalties to the ancestors of the inventors of the wheel. Thanks for the free work,here are some stock options! You're the lowly programmerz, I'm the IDEA GUY!
ck2 11y ago
Thanks to the original Netscape folks too.
- Tepix 11y ago
  No need to donate to them, they made millions :-)
acqq 11y ago
Here's the author's story, the making of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283693 Hint: from scratch, reading RFCs, in Turbo Pascal, as a part of his internet newsreader project! Also, http://petertattam.com http://petertattam.com is down currently, but http://www.trumpet.com.au http://www.trumpet.com.au Works.
cannam 11y ago
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. 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. In summer 1995 they replaced it with an ISDN line.
- TheRealDunkirk 11y ago
  In '95, I was running a dual Pentium machine for doing FEA. With a $2,500 video card (I can't remember the make), it had 3x the bang-for-buck as a mid-range Unix workstation. (We upgraded to Pentium Pro's ASAP.) Another guy in a cubicle next to mine had the biggest, baddest workstation in the company: an RS10K that cost $80K. This was in our pre-T1 days. Everyone was getting phone lines. I was using dual modems in my Windows NT machine. He was getting hooked up to a small ISP. The ISP's tech came in to configure his modem. It was taking awhile, so, as he struggled, I gave them both a hard time about how connecting my Windows NT machine to my ISP -- even with both modems -- took 15 minutes. He told me how Unix was "awesome" and that there were over 2000 options to configure. After 4 hours, he gave up and went back to the ISP to try from that end. A week later, the engineer with the RS still had no internet connection. After another week, his ISP got him online... and immediately crashed his machine. They discovered a firmware bug in the SGI that caused the kernel to panic every time the modem connected. They got a patch, and he FINALLY got online to get his email. And then we got a T1. But since this connection was SO hard-won, he kept his modem and his private domain. And then, soon after everyone started getting connected to ethernet and the T1, no one could get ANYWHERE. Lo and behold, the ISP tech had configured the engineer's modem connection to advertise itself as a route, and, since that hop was closer than getting 3 buildings away, every computer in my office started using it. It took several days to sort out. I noted, for the record, that this option for a modem connection was a prominent and easy-to-avoid checkbox on NT. It wasn't long before this other engineer left, and we were all glad for it. He was the biggest, narcissistic, pompous douchebag I've ever met, even to this day. And I soon began to prefer Linux to NT wherever I could get away with it. I don't know where I was going with all of this, but SGI and early internet days made me remember this anecdote.
petercooper 11y ago
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.. :-)
dankohn1 11y ago
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. 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. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/business/attention-shoppers-internet-is-open.html http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/business/attention-shopper... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGyhA-DIYvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGyhA-DIYvg
Sami_Lehtinen 11y ago
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.
danieltrembath 11y ago
As a mac user I mostly remember ButtTrumpet and giggling.
dsr_ 11y ago
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. Looks like he still has that up at http://www.crynwr.com/drivers/ http://www.crynwr.com/drivers/
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
korginator 11y ago
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.

415 points by wooby 11y ago

When I set that site up in 2011, it was really heart-warming how many people rallied around and chipped in. It's doubly nostalgic to see it here again, 5 years later. Edit: and there's still room on that donors page for any companies wanting to chip in something substantial. Edit 2: 5 years, not 4.

mahmud 11y ago
Good on ya, Jacques.
kristianp 11y ago
I'm interested in how much is being donated. Do you have any plans of releasing some stats?
- orf 11y ago
  I would be interested as well, it seems like the site should have been updated since then. Also I wonder what percentage of donations are a result of links to HN/reddit/social media rather than organic?
  - jacques_chester 11y ago
    Almost all of what are technically post-payments came from HN and Reddit links. On a normal day the site gets about 10 visits. In the last 9 hours it's had about 17k.
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  I think Peter would be amenable to it, I'll ask.
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  In the past 24 hours, according to Peter, "US$4458 less fees of US$178.32 in 78 payments. two large ones. $2000 and $500."

peckrob 11y ago

Oh man, the memories. For people who have grown up in a hyper-connected always-online world, it's hard to explain the pure joy 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. 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). 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. 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. [0] http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured...

gww 11y ago
Wow, MUDs I have not thought about the one I spent my teenage years playing until you mentioned them. I just checked and to my surprise it is still online. Too bad it looks like no one plays anymore.
- peckrob 11y ago
  Some of my best computer memories of that era are from playing various MUDs, and even 20+ years later I still keep up with some of the friends I met playing MUDs during those years. Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still around. I still connect every so often and chat with folks, maybe do a little light RP. Some of those same friends I've been playing with, on and off, for since the early to mid 90s. Even though we're scattered all over the world, it feels like we grew up together. I suppose, we kinda did. It always struck me odd that MUD playership kinda died off, seeing as how there are many many more people using the Internet now than there were in the 90s. Even accounting for cultural changes and technology moving on, I would have guessed that be enough new people interested in the old ways to keep the population at least level, but alas that doesn't seem to be the case. I'm glad I got to be a part of that era.

jeff_marshall 11y ago

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. 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.

api 11y ago
I remember the first time I did the email around the world trick. Back then you could telnet to port 25 and type in a smtp header with a source route and send an email that would bounce across a dozen mail servers as it circumnavigated the globe. Fun times.
- jeff_marshall 11y ago
  Yes! I did the telnet thing to mail servers while I was in high school to good effect ;). I would almost certainly cringe if I could see those mails today. Showing the school IT department what could be done with a semicolon in a URL on their servers would have gotten me suspended if it weren't for some understanding teachers. Thank god I only put a fork bomb (cringe of 2016 me is real) in there.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
samstave 11y ago
Heh. "local" -- ~1988 I was calling into BBSs in San Jose from Tahoe... the phone bill got to $926! I was grounded for a month. We wanted to play trade wars and the pit. Super fun. I also used to call up 411 (information, where you would call 411 and say "do you have a number for John Smith in lake tahoe ca?") -- and I would chat up the 411 operators for as long as possible - the contest being to see how long we could keep the op on the phone. Then I tried to make blue boxes.

SwellJoe 11y ago

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).

bashinator 11y ago
> Miami TCP stack back then, which I paid for. Yeah, this whole thread brought back how TCP/IP and dialup stacks used to be commercial. Huge win for the BSD license if you ask me.

orionblastar 11y ago

I had a PC Shop in 1995-1997 we sold copies of a software product called Internet in a Box. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_a_Box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_a_Box I think it competed with Trumpet Winsock. He had clients who used Trumpet Winsock but had problems configuring it so we helped them out. 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. 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. 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.

rmason 11y ago

I met Peter at BBSCon down in Tampa in 1995. A really humble guy and truly one of the nets pioneers.

cyanbane 11y ago

Color boxes, Phreaking, ASCII art groups, zips broken up at 1.44m, LOTD and other door games. That was my youth. Donation sent.

caf 11y ago
Wasn't it "LORD" (Legend Of the Red Dragon)?
- zwetan 11y ago
  more like LOD for Legion of Doom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_Doom_(hacking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_Doom_(hacking) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil
- lotharbot 11y ago
  He might also be thinking of a variation of "Land of Devastation" (http://www.smbaker.com/games/land-of-devastation-classic http://www.smbaker.com/games/land-of-devastation-classic )
- cyanbane 11y ago
  It was LORD. Not sure why I wrote LOTD.

jacquesm 11y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=p_trumpet https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=p_trumpet

jacques_chester 11y ago
Most of his comments were from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875 FWIW, you should not use Paypal donations. Use payments instead. Otherwise that account will probably get locked again.
- csense 11y ago
  > FWIW, you should not use Paypal FTFY. Someone should really hook this guy up with a Bitcoin address...

sengork 11y ago

I wonder how much of his programming know-how could be attributed to the high school curriculum. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSTS/E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSTS/E

kentf 11y ago

Instead of PayPal, let's use Tilt for this. It's free and a YC company. I am happy to set it up, unless someone else wants to.

bks 11y ago

I ran an ISP that used trumpet, before Windows 95 and it was way better than my SLIP account. Donation already sent! Thank you.

gethoht 11y ago

Donated $50 now that I have the cash. I did not have the money back when I was 12 and first getting into computing. Cheers to winsock.

smallreader 11y ago

This is great but should be tagged (2011).

emmanueloga_ 11y ago

On a related/tangential note, here [1] is the website for terminate, the world's most powerful communications software. 1: http://www.terminate.com/ http://www.terminate.com/

hyperdunc 11y ago
Haha thanks for that it sparked some memories. I used Terminate to connect to local BBSs and even set one up myself using Remote Access, which was a BBS software package. Before setting it up I printed the manual out on my old dot matrix and it took hundreds of pages.
efdee 11y ago
Ah Terminate. You made me happy when Telix failed me.

matthucke 11y ago

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. That is to say, I was a tech support lackey, answering the phones and talking to dozens of dialup ISP users daily. 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.

vidarh 11y ago
I co-founded a small ISP, and had the same experience - I used AmigaOS and Linux, and had only ever seen screenshots of Trumpet Winsock but knew the confguration far better than I'd like...
crb 11y ago
There was (and still is!) a great web site for this, letting you see where the various "Dial Up Networking" screens were in Windows: http://www.chasms.com/ http://www.chasms.com/
- steve-howard 11y ago
  What an amazing site. I was clicking through the advanced IPv4 settings on Windows 10 and clicking through the simulator for Windows XP and saw that they were exactly the same, beyond the different OS themes. So much overhaul for what network configuration looked like over the years, and the parts for experts are now deeply buried but unchanged.

tyingq 11y ago

Similarly, thanks KA9Q & WATTCP. Oh, and Kermit too.

aheilbut 11y ago

I always thought Netmanage Chameleon worked better.

marpstar 11y ago

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. I remember thinking "this is pointless" but went on to build my first web pages only a few years later (4th or 5th grade).

jlgaddis 11y ago
You just reminded me... I recently discovered that a website I made when I was a teenager is still online. I could still remember my username, was able to login, and was shocked to see the date stamps on the directory listing. The oldest file there is dated 19 May 1997 [0]. I intend to celebrate its 20th birthday in another ~16 months. [0]: There's actually one slightly older (28 Apr 1997), but it's an image (.gif), not a .html file.

sandworm101 11y ago

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.

kazinator 11y ago

> Do you remember connecting to the Internet in 1994 or 1995? In 1993 I was already using Linux, with an actual TCP/IP stack, not some bolted-on thing. In 1994 I was doing contract work on Linux already. One of the jobs was for these guys, still chugging along: http://www.infomine.com/ http://www.infomine.com/ 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. 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! 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.

Tepix 11y ago
Same here. I hardly used Trumpet Winsock because using first 386BSD 0.0 and later Linux was just the better way to get online :-) I still think it's great that Trumpet Winsock was around though. The more people on the internet, the merrier. Who knows if the internet would be everywhere today if the Windows users had been left out.
- adventured 11y ago
  > Who knows if the internet would be everywhere today if the Windows users had been left out I can answer that for you: yes, it would be. The value proposition is among the greatest that has existed in all of human history. The hardware was ready, the price was low enough, nothing was going to stop it; lack of a layperson standard mass-consumer OS would have just slowed it down briefly until one was inevitably created.
  - 11y ago

jlgaddis 11y ago

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. ftp.cdrom.com, metalab.unc.edu, sunsite.something, ...

yaowenjiaozi 11y ago
cica cica indiana
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  Oh, I'd forgotten about cica.cica.indiana.edu... kinda ironic since I'm only a couple of miles away from where it lived. You also reminded me of "The Usenet Oracle" (later, "The Internet Oracle" [0][1]) which also lived at IU. [0]: http://internetoracle.org/ http://internetoracle.org/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Oracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Oracle
yaowenjiaozi 11y ago
cica cica indiana
IvyMike 11y ago
wuarchive.wustl.edu
muppetman 11y ago
tucows?
mammo 11y ago
sunsite.unc.edu?
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  That's it
dugmartin 11y ago
simtel?

justin_vanw 11y ago

Donated just now, wish there was a way to give 20 years of compound interest along with it :(

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

tomcam 11y ago

I paid $25 around 1993 but I sure got my money's worth and then some--so tonight I kicked in another $38 gratefully.

sangnoir 11y ago

Moderators: shouldn't the title have a (2011) at the end? That is when it was authored.

seattlesbest 11y ago

Never work for free,we're not paying royalties to the ancestors of the inventors of the wheel. Thanks for the free work,here are some stock options! You're the lowly programmerz, I'm the IDEA GUY!

ck2 11y ago

Thanks to the original Netscape folks too.

Tepix 11y ago
No need to donate to them, they made millions :-)

acqq 11y ago

Here's the author's story, the making of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283693 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283693 Hint: from scratch, reading RFCs, in Turbo Pascal, as a part of his internet newsreader project! Also, http://petertattam.com http://petertattam.com is down currently, but http://www.trumpet.com.au http://www.trumpet.com.au Works.

cannam 11y ago

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. 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. In summer 1995 they replaced it with an ISDN line.

TheRealDunkirk 11y ago
In '95, I was running a dual Pentium machine for doing FEA. With a $2,500 video card (I can't remember the make), it had 3x the bang-for-buck as a mid-range Unix workstation. (We upgraded to Pentium Pro's ASAP.) Another guy in a cubicle next to mine had the biggest, baddest workstation in the company: an RS10K that cost $80K. This was in our pre-T1 days. Everyone was getting phone lines. I was using dual modems in my Windows NT machine. He was getting hooked up to a small ISP. The ISP's tech came in to configure his modem. It was taking awhile, so, as he struggled, I gave them both a hard time about how connecting my Windows NT machine to my ISP -- even with both modems -- took 15 minutes. He told me how Unix was "awesome" and that there were over 2000 options to configure. After 4 hours, he gave up and went back to the ISP to try from that end. A week later, the engineer with the RS still had no internet connection. After another week, his ISP got him online... and immediately crashed his machine. They discovered a firmware bug in the SGI that caused the kernel to panic every time the modem connected. They got a patch, and he FINALLY got online to get his email. And then we got a T1. But since this connection was SO hard-won, he kept his modem and his private domain. And then, soon after everyone started getting connected to ethernet and the T1, no one could get ANYWHERE. Lo and behold, the ISP tech had configured the engineer's modem connection to advertise itself as a route, and, since that hop was closer than getting 3 buildings away, every computer in my office started using it. It took several days to sort out. I noted, for the record, that this option for a modem connection was a prominent and easy-to-avoid checkbox on NT. It wasn't long before this other engineer left, and we were all glad for it. He was the biggest, narcissistic, pompous douchebag I've ever met, even to this day. And I soon began to prefer Linux to NT wherever I could get away with it. I don't know where I was going with all of this, but SGI and early internet days made me remember this anecdote.

petercooper 11y ago

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.. :-)

dankohn1 11y ago

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. 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. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/business/attention-shoppers-internet-is-open.html http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/business/attention-shopper... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGyhA-DIYvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGyhA-DIYvg

Sami_Lehtinen 11y ago

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.

danieltrembath 11y ago

As a mac user I mostly remember ButtTrumpet and giggling.

dsr_ 11y ago

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. Looks like he still has that up at http://www.crynwr.com/drivers/ http://www.crynwr.com/drivers/

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

korginator 11y ago

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.