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Peter Tattam created Trumpet Winsock and got very little: Let's set things right
469 points by jacques_chester on March 3, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 154 comments
While talking about the Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 upgrade video, I offhandedly made a joke at Trumpet Winsock's expense[1].

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].

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks, Peter.

---------------------------------------------

Donate to payments@petertattam.com

---------------------------------------------

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/)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281698 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281770




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


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

I don't think anybody can forget Trumpet. Trumpet is one of those pieces of software that is unique in that everybody has a warm memory about it, as evidenced by some of the great comments sprinkled throughout this thread and the previous one.

Since a Winsock implementation isn't really in need these days, what else have you been doing to keep yourself busy? I'm genuinely curious, and I'm sure a lot of other people stopping by the thread will be too.

(There was a comment about you in the previous thread that sounded fairly grim. If it's even a little accurate, I'm just all the more glad this happened.)


I have no idea about the demand (I didn't use PC:s back then, so I never used Trumpet WinSock), but the product seems to be still on offer: http://www.trumpet.com.au/index.php/downloads.html.


I am probably too young to have used your software. Just one piece of advice, please keep withdrawing amount from your paypal account, on timely (probably daily) basis, there are way too many horror stories about it.


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.


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.


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?


Banks don't do negative balances. Some banks will automatically turn overdrafts into loans or withdraw them from another account, to prevent you from having a withdrawal or debit denied, but you can generally disable that "feature". In the absence of that, an attempt to withdraw more than an account contains will result in a denial of the withdrawal and possibly a fee (either to the withdrawer or the withdrawee or both, depending on the circumstances and what the bank thinks it can get away with).

In any case, moving the money to an account PayPal doesn't have access to puts you in the much better position of PayPal having to ask you for money, rather than you having to ask PayPal to give your money back. At that point, at most they can lock your PayPal account (which still screws you out of any more donations made before you can say "stop sending money to this PayPal account, you're donating to PayPal").


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?


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


Is it's a big US Bank, assume you'll always get hit by some fee...


This can happen with Australian banks. However, the process used by Paypal to clear funds to Australian banks (known as the Direct Entry Payment System) is actually easily blockable at the bank level (ie, you can tell the bank to block all future direct debits from an individual merchant, assuming either they've already done it once, or you know their Direct Entry Code). Blocking it in this way won't even cause fees at your bank, although it might with Paypal...

I should know - I do this for customers at my bank every day. I'm not sure, however, whether this would also stop Paypal paying money into the account. I'm fairly certain not, but I've never had to stop someone paying money into an account before...


Could someone with a deeper knowledge on this comment on if this is possible or the clauses around it?


Oh! I did know that but never looked at it from that angle. Thanks for the reminder.


1000? How 'bout a hundred?


Sorry if that sounds being paranoid. I normally use Paypal to handle client payments for mu UI design stuff and hence they are not normally in the range of $100 (thankfullly). :)


I meant that I would not trust paypal with amounts over 100, and would transfer amounts over that quickly.


I'm curious about something. I remember paying $25 to some store at BYU to get Trumpet Winsock. Did you get anything from those type of purchases? If not, I'll donate. I might donate something anyway. :)

This little gem of software enabled me to get online with my first PC at college, so thanks for writing it!


Ah, these kids today don't know anything - rest assured that Trumpet will never be forgotten, and I find it just flabbergasting to be able to say hi to you, and thanks.


Hi back!!


Peter, I distinctly remember the first time I installed trumpet and I realized that I could use more than one application over the same connection at once. Until then, I had been using BBSes or dialup connections that used Lynx for web accesss so there was no notion of using email and a web browser concurrently. Trumpet gave me the first "real" Internet connection. Thank you sir, for creating such a wonderful product. I was genuinely saddened to hear your story the other day. Hope this goes a little way toward correcting some past wrongs.


While Trumpet was not the first access I had to the net, I am happy to say that Trumpet was [representative of] the first good access that I had to the net. It was easy to get running and did not intimidate.

Like all great tools, no news was always good news!

Checking in from Toronto, Canada to say a hearty "thanks, Peter!"


Forgotten? Never! You're one of my tech heroes. Thank you so much.


Not forgotten. I still remember your PetrOS project -- the premise made me quite excited at the time!


As a fellow Tasmanian, I can only tell you the awe I felt when I realised way back then (I used to dial into the University of Tasmania using Trumpet) that this great bit of software that _everyone used_ was written and developed by a person living in the same city as me.

Thanks!


Likewise. I can remember using WinSock at UTAS. I've got a mate that works opposite Peter's office in Bellerive and upon spying the office it almost felt like some sort of pilgrimage!


Peter how could we forget you. For a lot of us you were the one giving us a head start in our careers!

Thanks! didi


Sometimes you pay it forward, but sometimes you pay it back.


Thank you.


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.)


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.


"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.


yours is not the only story. While not directly Trumpet Winsock related, I did write an IRC client for DOS, later ported to Windows. I used to spend some time online chatting with folks who had low self esteem and on occasions found myself counselling people whose only connection with reality was the Internet. For these people, the Internet was a lifeline without which they may well have committed suicide or otherwise gone to places where few return.

I am so glad you found peace and a greater sense of belonging to the world.


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.


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.


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?


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.


> 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.


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


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

Thanks tho!


I do believe they fixed the issue with regards to minecraft.


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.


I dunno. I just guessed at $35, which would be on the high side of shareware pricing.

edit: looks like I guess pretty well.


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


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


I think your calculations of inflation are off just a bit...

$25 + $13.37 = $38.37


To be fair, your comment was a couple of days after his. Did you calculate that additional amount into your inflationary numbers? ;-)


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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...


Oh man, I used to have the exact same phone line fights with my dad. A friend of mine had two phone lines at his house, and was the object of great and furious envy. I'd all but forgotten the days when an internet connection was a special treat.


I don't think I am nearly as old as you, my first touch on the Internet was on a 133 Mhz Compaq Pressario with 64 Mb of ram.

My dad finally got a second line installed as it was starting to get annoying that I was on line pretty much 24/7. Never did use Trumpet Winsock but the Windows 95 built in dialer still gives me nightmares.


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


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

http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/


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?


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.


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

Cheerio.


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


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 :)


Thanks! I couldn't figure out how to donate to an email address just by navigating around PayPal's site, and without signing up, but that button allows me to do it directly.

Quick note, it defaults to AUD, not USD, but the exchange rate is almost 1:1, so it doesn't make a huge difference.


Donated.

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


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 :)


Not exactly true. The book Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh by Adam Engst (of TidBITS fame) also provided a licensed version. The ISP I worked for way back then distributed the book to new Mac users in order for them to be legal.


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.


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.


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.


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!


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

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


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.


Demon internet used this, and I think maybe still do: http://echannel.www.demon.net/helpdesk/technicallibrary/sdu/... 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.


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 ;)


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... ;-)


KA9Q taught me networking - I'm in!


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


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!


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.


Donated. Winsock + Slirp - truly life-changing.


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

http://vinatta.vinattaengine.com/Email/EmailInvite?campaignK...

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.


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


HN is kicking Reddit's ass, actually.


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.


The user base here is likely older.


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?


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


Donated. Warm thoughts, Mr Tattam.


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.


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.


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


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.


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


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.


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

http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/


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


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.


have contacted Daryl. This is legitimate folks.


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.


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


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


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


I'm not really that familiar with WePay, but why not?

His normal email is p.tattam@gmail.com -- drop him a line and talk him through it.


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.


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


Donated.


Donated.


Donated.


Donated.


Donated.


Donated.


Donated


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 :(


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!


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. :-)


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


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.


He should do a reddit AMA


Donated. From one Peter to another.


Donated.


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!


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.


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


[deleted]


urban myth. the only court case was the one with Ozemail, cited in the original thread. It cost both sides heaps to run the case and was settled out of court after the judgement was given. Trumpet Software did receive some $$$, but not on the scale you mentioned.


Peter never received any money from Microsoft.


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


Donated.


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


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


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!


New update here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303337


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


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.


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


I love this. Donated.


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


Donated.

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


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


derr, just saw the above post. Thanks.


Donated


Donated


Donated.


Donated.


Donated


Nice work; donated.


Donated


donated and twitted around


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.




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