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!