Thanks for Trumpet Winsock | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for Trumpet Winsock

thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com

415 pointswooby117 comments

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...

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.

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.

World of Warcraft (and sure, Everquest before that, but less so) seems to have done a number on text-based games. Less so MUSHes and the like, but the combat loop of MUDs--even RP-heavy ones--hasn't fared well today.

I'm glad I got to be a part of that culture. I learned a lot dealing with the everyday disasters of Bad Old C and ended up with responsibility and management long before I ever would have in the real world. Plus, they were a hell of a lot of fun when you found a neat spot that maybe nobody had seen since it was built.

MUDs are still a thing! There are heaps of little bespoke ones here and there, and lots of resources on Reddit [0].

I played one called Major Mud back in the day. When World of Warcraft came out, I thought, it's about time!

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/

EDIT: Check out this MUD, which won MUD of the Month on the subreddit above: http://www.luminarimud.com/FMud/FMud.html

I will certainly have to check that subreddit out. I really miss playing them they were something really special. I learned to program because I wanted to build areas and monsters on the MUD I played.

I've actually been working off and on on a MUD using Major Mud's dataset in Elixir for the last two years.

Really??!! That would be so good. It was such a vast game and I don't know where you can really play it anymore.

The only bad thing about it was how you had to let your character grind away for days and days on end. Most people would only come back to check on their grinds for an hour then let the script go back to its work.

I've tweaked my implementation some to make it more conducive to non-automated play. The experience needed to level is significantly lower after level 10 or so than in the original.

Also in my implementation rather than play as the original races / classes you play as Angels or Demons which can possess and play as monsters/npcs to experience different play styles without having to create new characters.

The Angel class is the default for new players and has a mechanism by which experience points are redistributed periodically from players with more to players with less which helps newer / less active players catch up / stay relevant. Veteran / active players who get tired of carrying the team can go dark side and become demons.

MajorMud had such great community support around it: Turbosentry's BBS crawling top list, Blood2HTML capture utility, MMudExplorer, Jigg's maps, Kotar's maps, the forums...suffice to say MajorMud was my late 90s and early 2000s stomping ground, transitioning from dial-up to telnet.

Things are actually looking much better now for the MUD i help run. Websockets made it possible to bring the game to a whole new crowd without requiring them to install some odd telnet thing. We had a few years when things did not look good at all and player numbers dropped every month.

I've been recreating that experience recently by trying to connect to my university VPN from China. Less the noises themselves of course.

> 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.

Same here. I still recall the first time I ever went online. My mind was blown and it changed everything.

I try to think about what a younger generation who was born into an "always connected" world will experience during their time as a truly transformative moment like that.

It surprises me how clearly I remember the first time I used the internet in 1995 (I was barely 7). My father worked on a predecessor to modern email in the 80s and by then was no longer programming, working in telecom instead. He had a keen interest in the internet, but it was a long time relatively speaking before we could justify the expense of a computer, modem, and home connection (service provided by Erols).

He loaded up AltaVista and explained what a search engine was, in terms that I could understand, by relating it to a library catalog. I'd only used those DOS catalogs to that point, and they were picky. I carefully typed on the Power Mac's keyboard, "Davis, Jim".

As the results crawled down the screen, I knew immediately that this was a world apart from reading old Garfield books at the library, that it was something totally new (and daunting). I really didn't know what to make of it.

A few days later I snuck into the office and printed out the career statistics of "Moon, Warren".

> those tones

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).

Such a great idea :-)

Mine too! I have the V.92 version, which gives careful listeners the impression of a slight anachronism since most people stopped hearing those tones before V.92 came out. :)

It definitely causes double takes on the rare occasions my phone isn't on silent and I receive and actual phone call.

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

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

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

The 'bongs' were known in the trade as the depth charges.

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.

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

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

I used to listen for the noise to determine if a connection was successful. I would disconnect promptly if it sounded bad. One day I think south Florida got a new area code or something...954 and I was still calling the 305 number for the BBS in Mismi (or something I was maybe 10 at the time, things are kinda fuzzy). At the end of the month found it my parents got charged $.25 per call because it's now considered long distance.

We were just talking about this a couple days ago at work! If you listened very carefully to the handshake, you could tell what the quality connection you had. After awhile, you could even guess the final baud from the sound of the handshake, and if it was bad, you'd try reconnecting a few times to see if you could get a better connection.

The Rockwell sweep always made me think of Neo leaving the Matrix for the real world.

Absolutely! I had a USRobotics 16.8k Dual-Standard modem that I bought in 1992 under the discounted Sysop program and that thing made the coolest noises of any modem I ever owned.

You may enjoy this from the awesome windytan.com, an annotated spectrum analysis and detailed description of the steps involved in a modem dialling up an ISP and negotiating a connection: http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured...

Curiously the key fits with the track I was listening to at the time: Dusky's Stick By This. Kind of interesting listening to them together.

Thanks for the handshake tone! The more, the merrier: did anyone archive examples from 1200bps up?

I've also been fruitlessly searching for line noise examples ~~~~~}}~00 etc. Remote Access had a line noise simulator; someone has to have details…

And let's not forget the great times that could be had by joining any large channel on IRC and sending a single command:

  /CTCP #channel PING +++ATH0

Interestingly enough, I tried it again a few months ago and was shocked to discover that it apparently still works.

Careful, it's a great way to still get k-line'd on many networks.

The DCC SEND bug is still pretty common too.

Old cruft doesn't die. Old cruft even gets ported to new platforms.

I installed https://github.com/SecUpwN/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector the other day and found a menu entry called "AT command interface", which I shall carefully leave alone.

Yes, the chip (or sub-chip) in your phone that talks to the mobile network is still called a modem, and is still controlled with the AT command set. When you answer a call it sends "ata" (AT Answer) to the modem. It does not pick up AT commands from the data passing through, unlike the old modems.

For those like me who didn't know what the above IRC line meant, http://everything2.com/user/xmatt/writeups/%252B%252B%252BAT... is a nice writeup.

The modem I had fixed this by requiring a 1 second gap after +++ where no bytes were sent before dropping into command mode.

According to legend, the 1-second gap was patent-protected, so that's why not every manufacturer implemented it. Arguably became more of a problem after the Internet since on BBS you were mostly navigating "trusted" menus and I think BBS chat servers would even drop the string.

Ahhh, memories... Ewan (telnet), Eudora (SMTP/POP3), FreeAgent (NNTP), WS_FTP (FTP), and, of course, writing the pre-requisite .cmd login scripts.

At first, though, dial-up Internet access was a long-distance phone call so mostly I'd use a free Juno account (e-mail only with free dial-up numbers) and do as much as I could via e-mail (including abusing the FTP-by-email gateways).

Before Juno, I paid a local BBS for e-mail access (they would dial up their gateway once a day, between 0400-0500 and do a UUCP transfer -- FidoNet transfers happened during the same "maintenance period"). I would dial in, upload the e-mail I had composed offline, download my new mail, and disconnect before reading it. Blue Wave 2.12 QWK offline mail reader. I'll never forget it.

Wow. Reminiscent of my experiences with the Internet back in the day. I wonder, how many of us might have had the exact same beginings?

Memories of internet in Australia in the mid-90s. We had a Maestro 33.6k modem, made just down the road in Bungendore. I remember my brother driving out there in the late 90s to upgrade the chipset to 56k. Later he set up IP masquerading on a linux box or maybe a monochrome SPARCstation and we shared the connection over our 10base2 ethernet. Dynamite internet and their controversially cancelled unlimited dial up plans...we needed to get a second phone line.

> 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/

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.

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.

> 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.

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

I was playing with Linux (Slackware) in 94, but was mainly using Trumpet on WfWg 3.11 until I discovered Windows NT. It had a full TCP/IP stack, which was rumored to have been stolen from BSD, IIRC. After NT got the Windows 95 facelift rev, it became a no-brainer replacement for Windows 3.x/95. It even ran most games! I also bought a dual P100 in 95, which is what made me post. I, too, found that they were about 30% faster than single-CPU boxes. I soon ran Linux for everything except games and CAD/FEA.

Well, considering the BSD network stack was BSD licensed, MS didn't really 'steal' it (http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641...)

I was still in high school. I do remember using Trumpet, but I also remember connecting to dial up using Slackware 3.6 and having one of those crappy internal WinModems that had drivers which depended on offloading processing to the cpu. I remember finding kernel modules someone had kludged together that allowed you to use a PCI winmodem in Linux. It was pretty cool getting Netscape Navigator running on Slackware over dial up.

By the time I started University, I had a 667Mhz P3 that used the BeOS boot loader to quad boot Win98, 2000, Linux and BeOS.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Where I live (lived) there's no such thing as free local calls. Whenever you dialed anything the meter started counting. I became very good at mentally preparing what I wanted to download before dialing :-)

That was pre-internet, at least where I lived, and we all used Fidonet[1]. Cant recall my node, it's been too long.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

I was a bit late to the internet game (I think ~1997), but this was the same in the UK too. Most ISPs had expensive subscriptions which gave you access to a freephone number. In 1998, AOL was £16.95 a month [0].

I can't remember who I started out with, but I switched to FreeServe after they launched. They provided subscription free access to a local rate number (which confusingly doesn't have to be geographically local), and made money by getting a cut of the call rates. I don't think they were the first to do this, but they had a partnership with one of the main computer retailers. They were so successful an investigation was launched by the regulator [1].

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/19980111054950/http://www.aol.co...

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/255200.stm

They provided subscription free access to a local rate number

And most [Well at that time really just BT or Cable/Wireless] telcos gave you free local calls. You just had to make sure you wasn't connected for more than an hour. I remember a program would disconnect and connect your modem every X minutes.

I remember back then [and to this day] my mind being blown that I was chatting to someone and there is a physical connection between us - there was a signal I was sending that had to use a physical wire connection all the way to their computer, so we could discuss topics we had only just discovered. Yes we felt special.

For me the 'magic' of the internet is now lost on people. It may not be a bad thing; I don't know, but it's accepted now we are always connected.

Back then, when you connected to the real internet [not AOL etc] it was like walking into the biggest library you had ever known and if you chose to be alone to take in that knowledge - you could. If you also wanted to engage with other people in the library - you would be polite and there was a mutual respect for you and your opinions. You could then leave the library and return when/if you wanted.

Rose tinted glasses maybe - but it's a very different Internet now.

I was curious about the state of POTS today and it's pretty much the same as it was twenty years ago. Separate local and long-distance plans. Night & weekend rates. Metered calls are all around $0.10/min. Even that abhorrent "local extended" tier that was the source of countless unexpectedly high bills.

In 1994 I called a remote system in Washington state (we were living in Tennessee) because I wanted to download a patch for Outpost [0] that added some of the enhancements that were supposed to be in the game from the beginning. I couldn't find it anywhere on the Internet at the time, but if you called this specific BBS in Washington, you could download it.

It took several hours to download. The total bill for that was like $50 or something. I had no idea it was going to be that much. I got in so much trouble for that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outpost_%28video_game%29

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.

Good on ya, Jacques.

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

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?

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.

I think Peter would be amenable to it, I'll ask.

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."

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.

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...

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/

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.

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).

> 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.

Here's the author's story, the making of:

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 is down currently, but

http://www.trumpet.com.au

Works.

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

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

He might also be thinking of a variation of "Land of Devastation" (http://www.smbaker.com/games/land-of-devastation-classic )

more like LOD for Legion of Doom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_Doom_(hacking)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil

It was LORD. Not sure why I wrote LOTD.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Most of his comments were from this thread: 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.

> FWIW, you should not use Paypal

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

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/

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).

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.

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... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGyhA-DIYvg

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, ...

cica cica indiana

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/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Oracle

wuarchive.wustl.edu

tucows?

sunsite.unc.edu?

That's it

simtel?

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.

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

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

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.. :-)

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.

I always thought Netmanage Chameleon worked better.

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

This is great but should be tagged (2011).

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

As a mac user I mostly remember ButtTrumpet and giggling.

Thanks to the original Netscape folks too.

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

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

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!

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

1: http://www.terminate.com/

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.

Ah Terminate. You made me happy when Telix failed me.

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.

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.

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