
Thanks for Trumpet Winsock - wooby
http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/
======
peckrob
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...](http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-
pictured.html)

~~~
jlgaddis
> _those tones_

[http://evilrouters.net/56k.mp3](http://evilrouters.net/56k.mp3) (MP3)

It's my ring tone. I love the weird looks on people's faces when I'm in a
meeting and my phone rings -- especially the "older" crowd (some of the
"youngsters" don't recognize the sound).

~~~
whoopdedo
Did you know each manufacturer had a unique sound for their v90 handshake?
This one sounds like a Lucent WinModem. (Based on listening to the sounds
here[1]. Yay for RealAudio!) The USR/3Com modems were two "bongs" (four if the
higher speed failed). But I was always fond of the Rockwell sweep[2].

Of course, required reading is HN favorite Oona Räisänen's excellent analysis
of a modem handshake.

[1]
[http://modemsite.com/56k/trouble3.asp](http://modemsite.com/56k/trouble3.asp)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c)

[3] [http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-
pictured...](http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-
pictured.html)

~~~
jwr
Yeah, I listened to the file and immediately thought: that's not how my US
Robotics sounded! It's amazing how one remembers it after all these years. In
my case, it's probably because of the poor line quality, one _always_
connected with the sound on, and one prayed quite a bit to get a good
connection.

~~~
neoyagami
Damn. Nostalgia hit right there. I had a lucent winmodem. I rrmembrr the time
when i did my firts switch to linux ( redhat 7) and there was no way in making
it work there:( luckily I found a isa modem (33k) that was compatible out of
the box, those were the times

~~~
jacquesm
Anybody else here guilty of stripping the low pass filters out of their local
lines at night? Sure improved throughput :)

------
kazinator
> _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
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
> 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.

~~~
Tepix
You're forgetting about the competition. If AOL had had an even larger market
share, they could potentially been more attractive than the internet.

------
sengork
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)

------
jeff_marshall
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.

~~~
samstave
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.

~~~
coderdude
I racked up a hefty bill one month for my mom back in day connecting to the
net at all times of the night. The old Web was such a glorious thing. My
favorite activity was to download images and animated GIFs so that I could
have them forever. You just never knew if you'd find them again and having
access to new content was a novel concept to me. I still have that folder.
Backed up over 17 years just because I still can't let go of them.

Now I just play survival games and hoard items. I have no fear that I won't be
able to find something I saw on the Web. It's harder to lose things forever.
Such a different world and one I could not have imagined.

~~~
peteretep
Upload them to imgur. I'm sure it'll be a trip down memory lane for a lot of
us.

~~~
coderdude
That's a great idea. The backup is on my desktop so I'll have to wait until I
can access it. Would love to share it.

------
jacques_chester
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.

~~~
kristianp
I'm interested in how much is being donated. Do you have any plans of
releasing some stats?

~~~
orf
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
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.

------
matthucke
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.

~~~
crb
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
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.

------
SwellJoe
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
> 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.

------
acqq
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.

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

~~~
caf
Wasn't it "LORD" (Legend Of the Red Dragon)?

~~~
lotharbot
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) )

------
orionblastar
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.

------
gethoht
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.

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

------
cannam
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
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.

------
jacquesm
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=p_trumpet](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=p_trumpet)

~~~
jacques_chester
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
> FWIW, you should _not_ use Paypal

FTFY. Someone should really hook this guy up with a Bitcoin address...

------
dsr_
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/)

------
marpstar
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
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.

------
dankohn1
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-
shopper...](http://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/business/attention-shoppers-
internet-is-open.html) [1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGyhA-
DIYvg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGyhA-DIYvg)

------
jlgaddis
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, ...

~~~
mammo
sunsite.unc.edu?

~~~
jlgaddis
That's it

------
korginator
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.

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

------
petercooper
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.. :-)

------
Sami_Lehtinen
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.

------
aheilbut
I always thought Netmanage Chameleon worked better.

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

------
smallreader
This is great but should be tagged (2011).

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

------
danieltrembath
As a mac user I mostly remember ButtTrumpet and giggling.

------
ck2
Thanks to the original Netscape folks too.

~~~
Tepix
No need to donate to them, they made millions :-)

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

------
seattlesbest
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!

------
emmanueloga_
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
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.

------
kentf
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.

------
sandworm101
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.

