
Peter Tattam created Trumpet Winsock and got very little: Let's set things right - jacques_chester
While talking about the Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 upgrade video, I offhandedly made a joke at Trumpet Winsock's expense[1].<p>In the comment below, nailer mentioned that the creator of Trumpet Winsock saw very little money from one of the most widely-used pieces of shareware then in existence. Magazines and ISPs distributed the full version of his software but very few paid for it[2].<p>My first experience connecting to the internet was using Windows 3.1, Trumpet Winsock and Netscape 1.22 (I think) to browse the nascent web. Later I wiled away (too many) hours on IRC.<p>At the time I didn't have two 50c coins to rub together. Today, partly due to that early internet exposure, I am a well-paid software engineer.<p>In the same thread I have alluded to you will find that we identified Peter Tattam and two of us (badmonkey0001 and I) contacted him independently.<p>At our prompting Peter has set up a Paypal account where you can make donations. I invite you to chip in to reward a man whose work let so many of us open the door, for the first time, to an important part of our lives.<p>Thanks, Peter.<p>---------------------------------------------<p>Donate to
payments@petertattam.com<p>---------------------------------------------<p>Edit: now cross-posted at Reddit in non-karma-harvesting format (http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/fwciq/peter_tattam_created_trumpet_winsock_enabling/)<p>[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281698
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281770
======
p_trumpet
I can confirm that the email is the one I passed on to Jacques. The PayPal
account is a legit one I have used in the past and is registered under the
business name Tattam Software. If I encounter any problems I will look into
the other option.

Thanks all... I had honestly thought the Internet had forgotten about me.

Peter

~~~
tuhin
With Paypal's history, I normally keep clearing them to my bank as they keep
reaching a certain limit of say $1000. I mean I know it is stupid and misses
the entire point of Paypal, but I would rather do this than my account being
frozen.

~~~
floatingatoll
After you clear to the linked bank account, you need to be sure to move the
money into a second account, as they are permitted by the terms of service to
attempt to withdraw from your linked bank account any and all money they deem
necessary up to the total amount received for all transactions for a good deal
of time. I strongly advise you link a non-primary account for this reason.

~~~
slater
Wouldn't they just attempt to withdraw it from a now empty bank account,
leaving you with overdraft fees?

EG let's say you have $100 in your paypal account, which you send to bank
account A. From there, you send it to bank account B, leaving bank account A
empty. Paypal decides to withdraw $100 from bank account A, leaving you with
-$100 on A, and $100 on B?

~~~
michaelcampbell
I /think/ this may depend on the mechanism used to move the money. Do ACH
transfers incur NSF/Overdraft fees, or do they simply get rejected?

~~~
nkassis
Yes, it's similar to a check at least that what I understood from my bank when
it happened in the past.

------
seldo
Donated. As a closeted gay teenager, Trumpet was the software that got me in
touch with the people who literally saved my life. I could never thank this
guy enough.

(Edit: if you felt like making another worthy donation, the Youth Guard
mailing lists are the people I'm referring to -- <http://www.youth-
guard.org/youth/> . I cannot overstate the impact they had on my life.)

~~~
jedsmith
There's no easy way to word what I came away from your comment with, so I'll
just get it out there: your comment was exceedingly enlightening. I doubt that
during the development of Trumpet anybody thought they were saving even one
life (it's a sockets API!), and your story speaks volumes about how
programmers can touch lives in ways they'd never imagine during development.

Moral I learned: it's _really_ easy to underestimate impact. I'm personalizing
that to relate to development, but I think it's applicable to a lot of what we
do.

Thank you for sharing your story. Even though it wasn't directed at me, it
gave me considerable pause and something to think about.

~~~
evanjacobs
"it's really easy to underestimate impact"

And I bet the guy who made the video which inadvertently spawned this idea
probably didn't imagine the impact it would have on another man's life.

------
patio11
Suggestion: pay him by Mass Payment. You end up kicking in $0.50 in paypal
fees, he doesn't have to pay to receive. It ends up that more of your donation
reaches him net (if you donate above, let's see, $7.25 or so).

You'll need to save a text file. I think you guys can probably manage, but to
make it copy/paste easy:

\---

payments@petertattam.com (tab) 25.00 (tab) USD (tab) winsocks_rocked (tab)
This is a totally optional comment.

\---

Thanks for Winsock, by the way. You saved me hours of frustration when I was
trying to get Compuserve and Warcraft 2 to work together, back in middle
school. Crikey I feel old.

~~~
pjvandehaar
Another way to avoid PayPal fees is to 1) decide how much to give, 2) multiply
it by six, and 3) decide by dice roll whether to give it.

------
ck2
Just a warning, if it's a new paypal account and there are a bunch of
donations, PayPal will lock the account and keep the money for themselves
until he runs their gauntlet.

Actually, they'll sometimes do that on accounts that are a decade old, but new
accounts especially.

Maybe use WePay instead with a target amount?

~~~
tomjen3
WePay doesn't work except in the US, which will do nought to get him money
from outside the US, where he no doubt has fans to.

Besides if PayPal is that stupid, we can always post to reddit that PayPal is
stealing the guys money. Should cause enough of a problem that they open it
again.

~~~
sorbus
> Should cause enough of a problem that they open it again.

Do you have any examples of negative publicity leading to paypal correcting
their mistake? I've never seen anything like that in any of the stories about
paypal freezing accounts, even the fairly high profile ones.

~~~
kam
A few days ago they reinstated the account of Courage to Resist, a Bradley
Manning defense fund. The organization seems to think it was because of the
pressure from bad publicity:
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20036476-38.html>

~~~
hellscreamgold
I'll keep donating to the Hang Bradley Manning as a Traitor fund.

Thanks tho!

------
angrycoder
How much did a license for the original Trumpet Winsock cost?

Nevermind, in 1993 a single license for Trumpet Winsock cost $25 usd. Adjusted
for inflation that is $38.10 today.

~~~
dstein
I guess it would be reasonable to ask people pay the full $25 if they ever
used a pirated copy of the software.

~~~
rakista
I'm pretty sure I dealt with an ISP that distributed a pirated copy when I was
going to school up in MN.

------
acabal
Great idea. With all the Paypal horror stories out there I honestly hope
you've set up the account so that it doesn't get wrongly frozen if the
donations start ramping up.

------
Whitespace
I used to wake up in the middle of the night and sneak downstairs with my
brother, lugging our family's first computer, a Compaq Presario all-in-one
(similar to the gumdrop iMac) onto the dining room table so we could connect
to the internet. With a 486DX2/66 and 4MB ram, we'd load up Tabworks and use
the /worst/ browser in existence (don't recall the name, but it was probably a
rip off of Mosaic) and dial out to IDT.net to connect to the internet.

Later on, after saving money to upgrade to a whopping 12MB ram and Windows 95,
that same computer allowed to to play multiplayer Diablo, which was my first
taste of IRC. Naturally it was all downhill from there, and I played Diablo
for two years straight.

There were a lot of fights in our household over phone bills and busy dial
tones, and I'm sorry that my sister was left stranded at school with no ride
because I was busy downloading FreeBSD, but now I'm a successful software
engineer and budding entrepreneur in the education space, and it's all thanks
to those formative moments panicking at 3 am, trying so hard to muffle the
sounds emanating from my 9600 kbaud modem as it connected me to an exciting
new world.

Thanks, Peter. Thank you so much.

~~~
henrikschroder
ATL0 was a great command that muted the modem so that your parents couldn't
hear that you were dialing up. :-)

Oh wow, now I feel old.

~~~
xd
Wasn't ATH0+++ used to cause modem users to hangup via IRC CTCP requests? Good
days.

~~~
elliottcarlson
A popular multi-line BBS back in Colorado had one faulty modem and if you were
to post that in chat the person on that line would get disconnected... good
times, good times.

~~~
a1k0n
It probably had a modem that didn't pay Hayes to license the patent on
enforcing a delay in switching from data mode to command mode (+++ did that,
and then ATH0 was the AT command to hang up the phone -- normally you'd have
to wait a couple seconds, type +++, wait a couple more seconds, and then you'd
get an OK and could type AT commands).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Independent_Escape_Sequenc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Independent_Escape_Sequence)

------
InclinedPlane
I feel like Dr. Sam Beckett, travelling back in time to put right what once
went wrong.

------
benwerd
Donated $38.10, the amount declared as the inflation-adjusted registration
fee. My message:

Thank you for my career.

I've run open source projects, built e-learning systems, helped charities in
Colombia work together, worked with people revolutionizing journalism and
(once, by accident) made a large number of Utah Mormons very angry. None of
this would have happened without the software you created. Thank you.

------
jacques_chester
Update: I've created a very simple site you can refer people to.

<http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/>

~~~
dedward
No disrecpect to anyone invovled.

The gang over here is all hot to chip in their donations..... Is there
consensus that this is definitely legitimate and that the money will really go
to Peter?

~~~
jacques_chester
That is a reasonable question.

You can independently contact Peter or myself.

Peter has his own company, Tattam Software Enterprises, which you can look up
(<http://www.trumpet.com.au/>).

I work for Charles Darwin University, you can look me up on their web site
(<http://cdu.edu.au>).

If you are unsure, contact either of us by email or phone.

Note: I will be unavailable from midday, Australian Central Standard Time.

~~~
dedward
Good enough for us - if nobody's screaming scam by tomorrow morning we'll have
a few more guys pitching in.

Cheerio.

~~~
jacques_chester
Out of curiousity, who is "the gang over here"?

~~~
dedward
Heh... nobody interesting, just me and a few hacker buddies who skipped
university to start ISPs and whatnot back when the internet wave was kicking
off publicly way back when :)

------
koudelka
Donated.

Even though I was kicking around the net on my Macintosh SE/30, using
MacSLIP/MacTCP, this is a great idea.

~~~
flomo
Just a footnote. MacTCP was only available as part of an Apple site-license.
However it was also commonly distributed illegally by ISPs and magazines. Most
home Mac users on the internet prior to about 1996 probably inadvertently
warezed it. (MacSLIP/MacPPP was freeware however.)

Not that I'm suggesting you donate to Apple anymore than you already do :)

~~~
iMouse
Then there were the rest of us Mac users who used FreePPP. :-) There is
nothing funnier than thinking back to when I would smother my modem in a
pillow at 1:00 in the morning while it dialed out.

The FreePPP plugin for the Control Strip made dial-up idiot-proof. I remember
running a custom installation of System 7.5 just because the Control Strip
wasn't a standard install on desktop Macs.

~~~
koudelka
That takes me back to writing modem init scripts. I always laughed when my dad
typed "assword" in, since he wanted to match both (p|P)assword.

------
rmason
Truly one of the unsung heroes of the Internet. Actually met him at a
BoardWatch conference where he received a well deserved award.

Fondly remember Trumpet as the key that unlocked the door to using Mosaic.
Jumping from text only to a browser was like going from black and white to
technicolor.

~~~
p_trumpet
Heh. I remember going to Tampa (my first ever trip to the States) to get that
Dvorak Award, which is sitting on the equivalent of my mantelpiece (I'll take
a photo to prove it!). BBS-CON was the conference. I remember shaking the
hands of a good many people back then - little did I know how much the
onslaught of Windows 95 would have on the market. I was told, flatteringly, by
one industry observer at the time that Trumpet accelerated the Internet by
about a year - who knows, but it certainly was a wake up call for M$ who
really hadn't taken much notice of the Internet before then and was only
interested in a vertical control over the industry by peddling their own
network protocols. Writing Trumpet Winsock to published and open protocols was
a testament to the beauty of openness.

And some trivia.... the name Trumpet was actually the first product I made, an
Internet newsreader for DOS - as in a newspaper name like "The Daily Trumpet".
Also I like trumpets, having played one for many years, and also the
apocalyptic themes of the final trumpet sounding appealed to me too. As I was
writing it in Turbo Pascal back then, there was no open source TCP stack in
pascal, so I had to write one, from scratch, armed only with the RFCs.
Ultimately that TCP core became Trumpet Winsock.

The Internet really was a wild western frontier back then, with so many things
being done for the first time - it was a matter of who was the quickest to
market and could anticipate what was needed. P!

~~~
badmonkey0001
A link to your award sir. Well deserved. Enjoy dinner ;)

<http://www.citivu.com/dvorak/95awds.html#winsock>

~~~
GFischer
Serves to get a feel of how the Internet was at the time:

"(Yahoo) lists over 55,000 sites and receives (snip) 250,000 users"

It also serves as an example to enterpreneurs:

"Not wishing to sell Yahoo to the various corporations that expressed interest
they found venture capital, took a leave from Stanford, and went for the brass
ring. They now devote their full time to Yahoo as the traffic continues to
increase."

Indeed, Tattam's work was more revolutionary than the people at the time
expected.

------
xd
Demon internet used this, and I think maybe still do:
[http://echannel.www.demon.net/helpdesk/technicallibrary/sdu/...](http://echannel.www.demon.net/helpdesk/technicallibrary/sdu/connection/trumpet.html)
Funnily the images on the page actually show that they are using an evaluation
copy!

I've sent them an email referencing this story to see if they step up and at
least make a donation.

Would be great if some more people could email them as I don't see them taking
a random email like I've sent seriously.

EDIT: Demon internet is an ISP based in the UK.

~~~
p_trumpet
Some ISPs did license it properly on behalf of their users, and I think demon
may have been one (sorry no records as I left the company Trumpet Software
some years ago, except the builds I did which are on an archive I still have).
You don't want to know how messy the typical licensing arrangements for ISPs
ended up though... at the end of the day it was a headache for both us and the
ISP. Bottom line was if your version came up unregistered, in all likelihood
it wasn't properly licensed as each ISP would have received their own
customized build encoding the ISP (or distributor's) name. Needless to say,
the number of builds I did was a couple of magnitudes smaller than the number
of ISPs using it ;)

------
petercooper
You rich folks in the 90s.. all my computer could run was DOS so I used the
then-popular KA9Q by Phil Karn. If anyone wants to start a donation drive for
Phil... ;-)

~~~
rduerden
KA9Q taught me networking - I'm in!

~~~
p_trumpet
ahh.... KA9Q, I remember it well. Was one of the first internet programs I got
to work.

------
davidmurphy
Literally don't have any extra money right now (and I used a Mac back in the
day), but I tweeted this to help get the word out, and want to at least my
thanks to you, Peter, for your important early role in the internet (I heard
about this, even if I didn't use it as a Mac user), even if I can't give
money, let me say: well done.

Pat yourself on the back and know your efforts were useful for a great many
people. Well done, good sir!

------
prawn
Donated. Thanks Peter. I had no idea that all of that mucking around trying to
get things connected back then would lead to my career for the last 15 years
and my own business for the last 13 years of that.

------
lanstein
Donated. Winsock + Slirp - truly life-changing.

------
gkn
Hello HN. Here is a campaign I set up today for this cause

[http://vinatta.vinattaengine.com/Email/EmailInvite?campaignK...](http://vinatta.vinattaengine.com/Email/EmailInvite?campaignKey=Dlo74GKsp2)

It might help to get the message out to a wider audience.

Shameless plug: This is a part of my Internet Startup. You can opt in to have
your name (or alias) published.

------
jedsmith
Hacker News giving Reddit a run for its money? Bravo.

~~~
lanstein
HN is kicking Reddit's ass, actually.

~~~
jedsmith
Reddit has the _donate to a shiny object_ market cornered at the moment, at
least from my reading. It's a good market to disrupt.

------
henrikschroder
So, how do I?

I don't have a PayPal account, and I'm trying to navigate their site to find
out how to do a donation, but I can't find anything like it? The closest match
is making an "International Payment", is that the one? And why do I need to
select which country he is in?

Or should I sign up and perform some other action when logged in?

~~~
henrikschroder
Edit: The link that jacques_chester posted has a donate button, that solved it
for me.

------
tobych
Donated. Warm thoughts, Mr Tattam.

------
ghostDancer
Just when i think nothing can impress me more, i find that in HN you can, i'm
not technician, not a programmer and not and entrepreneur. I follow HN because
i like the news and mainly the discussions, seeing different points of view,
etc ... and from time to time in HN you make a thing that surprises me and
show the power you have inside you. Like now from a video , came a comment
about the old days , you found the person and so many years after you organize
a tribute, because apart from the money this really is more of a tribute to a
man whose work you admire. HNers you are great. Maybe the vets say that this
is not the original HN but i think the spirit of HN is there.

------
hanifvirani
There is a big difference between thinking of doing something good and
actually making it happen. Kudos to the guys who arranged this. It's great to
see everyone donating. Just goes to show how many lives Peter impacted with
his work.

~~~
jacques_chester
It also shows the power of the internet to let ordinary people to get together
to show some love quickly and easily.

------
lukeh
I too have fond memories of Trumpet. I remember even then (I must have been 15
or so) thinking that this software was so important and likely undervalued. Of
course, I used it and never donated as I didn't have any money - something I
intend to rectify now! For a while in those days, I was behind a SOCKS
firewall, and I convinced Peter to add SOCKS support to the stack itself -
something which perhaps ignited my love of somewhat abstraction violating
clever hacks! And of course it helped start my career in computing, as did
APANA and a bunch of other very kind Australians.

------
eps
Is there a way to make a donation without needing to create a PayPal account?

~~~
jacques_chester
I'd say get in touch with him by email. You might be able to do a bank
transfer, a Western Union order or even, god forbid, send a cheque.

~~~
jacques_chester
Update: the donate button I have at the site lets you pay with your CC.

<http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/>

------
nl
I lived on Winsock + SLIRP + a university terminal account in 1994. Donated!

------
Daryl_Hatton
I'm Daryl Hatton, CEO of FundRazr. As an "old guy" in this industry, I really
benefited from Peter's work. I've set up a FundRazr campaign on Facebook to
help collect money for Peter. The money goes directly to Peter's PayPal
account. I will refund our portion of the PayPal fees back to Peter when the
campaign is finished so that this doesn't make us any money.

Check out the campaign at <http://bit.ly/fDzVOF>

Make a donation but, at the very least, share it with your friends so that we
can get Peter some of the money he deserves.

~~~
p_trumpet
have contacted Daryl. This is legitimate folks.

------
Kukasauto
Well, it appears that I cannot send the money I wanted because Paypal has
assigned my credit card to another account.

Thanks, Paypal, I didn't authorize that. I do not WANT you to lock my account,
or have anything to do with you and your freezing account policy crap. I just
want to donate to worthy causes.

That said, I'm in Finland. US-Only solutions don't work for obvious reasons
(among them, outside the US we don't have 30-day-waits for check cashing...)
so I'm looking for a way to set this right that I can use here.

------
MichaelApproved
Is there an official story from Peter about how all this happened?

~~~
jnorthrop
A little bit of it here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283693>

------
true_religion
This actually sounds like a job that WePay would be better for.

~~~
tuhin
Not sure. We Pay is ideally better for consumers, right? The donations are
being made for what Peter made possible with Trumpet Winsock. I mean we are
actually donating for his services and software, right? Sorry to go wayward,
but just did not understand why We Pay and not Paypal would be a better
option.

~~~
pyre
Less likely for a sudden burst of activity to result in a frozen account?

------
onethumb
Donated.

------
cema
Donated.

------
bennytheshap
Donated.

------
jacques_chester
Donated.

------
aedocw
Donated.

------
bpfh
Donated.

~~~
metadaddy
Donated

------
floatingatoll
I would be happy to donate to Peter personally, except that Paypal is will
likely freeze his account in the next few days specifically due to a high
volume influx of varying dollar amounts from a variety of sources without a
physical product or service provided. So my donation must go elsewhere than
him personally, and that makes me very sad :(

------
evgeny0
Donated.

Thank you for opening up the online world to me, back in the days when just
trying to connect to the Internet was a bit of an adventure!

------
gbhn
I'm happy to be able to say both that I realized how awesome Trumpet was back
in the day, and that I made the choice to send Peter the $25 registration back
when that was a harder choice than it is now. It's nice to be able to remember
and renew my license, as it were. :-)

------
cdeutsch
Donated! Trumpet Winsock was the gateway to my first internet experience.
Thanks Peter!

------
nifaprte
Donated. I once had to put an early (Win 3 I think) version onto the Net. It
was the first time I connected anything to the Net and opened up a whole new
world to me. For that I am very grateful. I would be extremely interested to
see the total that peter actually receives. So if someone can ask Peter if he
could set up some sort of online running total thing I think it would be a
nice thing to watch as I have always believed that Geeks/Nerds/PeepsLikeMe
have a financial conscience and I would like to see that shown in black and
white. Please.

------
petdog
He should do a reddit AMA

------
p0ppe
Donated. From one Peter to another.

------
abend
Donated.

------
kingofspain
I had to pester a schoolfriend for weeks until he copied me this onto a disk
when I was a poor 14 year old (no idea if he paid for it, but I doubt it given
his rep!)

I probably would've gone into this field without it but I got a big head start
regardless. I'm donating.

I should probably send some money my parents way too. Long distance modem
calls weren't exactly cheap back then!

~~~
heresy
Before internet came to our parts I would make long distance calls to BBS's
with a 2400baud modem, spending hours downloading classics like WinZip :)

My parents got a $900 phone bill once (a _lot_ of money in South Africa). I
mowed many lawns to pay that one off.

------
richardtallent
Peter, your software made it possible for me and three other guys to start a
local ISP in 1995 and support Win 3.11 for many years until Windows 9x finally
penetrated the market. This start-up cemented my career in web app
development.

On principle, I no longer maintain a PayPal account, but next time you're in
Beaumont, Texas, a pint is on me!

Cheers

------
Asuyuka
I will donate ASAP. This man's work allowed us to get on the net with our old
386sx and Win 3.1 machine using Mosaic. I don't know if it was paid for or
not, I'm too young to remember, but this guy deserves it for his effort and
how its affected me. Thank you.

------
georgeott
Donated. Ah, the memories of surfing the real web in 1994. (Not some
Prodigy/AOL version of it)

------
Asuyuka
I will donate ASAP. This man's work allowed us to get on the net with our old
386sx and Win 3.1 machine using Mosaic. I don't know if it was paid for or
not, I'm too young to remember, but this guy deserves it for his effort and
how its affected me.

------
nostriluu
No offence to the developer who did a good thing at the time, but what you
guys are talking about here is the Internet. Consider instead sending your
money to the FSF or other groups that make sure Internet is great now and in
the future.

------
VSpike
Trumpet was a fantastic piece of software. Strangely, I was only talking about
it a couple of days ago. Happy to donate for the hundreds of hours I spent
online with it, and the fun I had creating dialup scripts in it.

------
zaivala
I know my life would have been much less without Trumpet Winsock. I hope I can
remember to donate when I get some money late in the month. It's great to be
able to help someone who helped me so much.

------
joshfraser
Donated.

------
trumpit
Contribute? Absolutely - but never using PayPal. Find another method.

~~~
jacques_chester
Email peter directly to arrange something else (p.tattam@gmail.com).

------
zandorg
I never knew what a 'winsock' was, but at my college in '97, we used dial-up
to connect to Demon on Windows 3.1, and it worked great. I used to FTP Amiga
demos.

Will donate!

------
jacques_chester
New update here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303337>

------
metageek
Donated. I never used Winsock, but I worked for Netscape, which would've been
worth a lot less without Trumpet getting users online.

------
heresy
Being online via Trumpet Winsock was how I downloaded my first Linux
distribution.

Knowing Linux at the right time (1998) was how I got my first job.

Donated.

------
gfodor
Trumpet was a truly magical piece of code, basically the gateway to the world
we live in today. Donated.

------
ljonesfl
I love this. Donated.

------
laxbobber
I love it, spread the word people! +1 donation from me!

------
asdfasdffdsa
Donated.

BTW: What was the original cost of Trumpet? (for an end user)

~~~
jacques_chester
US$25, or about $38 in today's money according to one calculation.

~~~
asdfasdffdsa
derr, just saw the above post. Thanks.

------
ak1394
Donated

------
michaelcampbell
Donated

------
guruz
Donated.

------
nicpottier
Donated.

------
jhuckestein
Donated

------
echion
Nice work; donated.

------
ramarnat
Donated

------
marcing
donated and twitted around

------
yuhong
XP and later has a built-in IPv6 stack, but I remember reading that Trumpet
Winsock later provided IPv6 implementations for older versions of Windows for
the few people still using them.

