5 ms·
“Late 1990s” is a bit of a stretch. Dialup ISPs were widespread by the mid-1990s, and there was broad enough demand that third parties shipped TCP/IP stacks on
by twoodfin 5y ago
“Late 1990s” is a bit of a stretch. Dialup ISPs were widespread by the mid-1990s, and there was broad enough demand that third parties shipped TCP/IP stacks on Windows 3.1 before Windows 95 built one in.
- ubermonkey 5y agoAaaaah, Trumpet!
- ncphil 5y agoNetManage! Or WFW 3.1 and win32 extensions to run NCSA Mosaic. Good times.
- aidenn0 5y agoTrumpet, possibly one of the most commercially pirated pieces of software in the US. Casual piracy was definitely a thing, but many ISPs sent out Trumpet Winsock to their customers without paying a dime.
- drone 5y agoYou bring back memories for me - I worked for one of the first rural ISPs in Indiana in '95. Having to debug people's Winsock setups over the phone still makes me shudder a bit. Not to mention the Apple customers, where I didn't even have a Mac available to me and I learned by trial and error - pretending like there were dynamic outcomes for every customer "Yes, now read off for me what that screen says." The fun one was introducing people to basic concepts, like "Ok, that thing is your mouse, see the two buttons? Let me explain how you're going to use them on this call.