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.
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).
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".
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, 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.
> 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.
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] peckrob|10 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] jlgaddis|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] oinksoft|10 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] jlgaddis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlgaddis|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gww|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandon272|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wycx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peteretep|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignoramous|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Tepix|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] djsumdog|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TheRealDunkirk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sengork|10 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] jeff_marshall|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] api|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacques_chester|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mahmud|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthucke|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vidarh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SwellJoe|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bashinator|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cyanbane|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orionblastar|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmason|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cannam|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacques_chester|10 years ago|reply
FWIW, you should not use Paypal donations. Use payments instead. Otherwise that account will probably get locked again.
[+] [-] dsr_|10 years ago|reply
Looks like he still has that up at http://www.crynwr.com/drivers/
[+] [-] marpstar|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
[0]: There's actually one slightly older (28 Apr 1997), but it's an image (.gif), not a .html file.
[+] [-] dankohn1|10 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] jlgaddis|10 years ago|reply
ftp.cdrom.com, metalab.unc.edu, sunsite.something, ...
[+] [-] IvyMike|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mammo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yaowenjiaozi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muppetman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dugmartin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yaowenjiaozi|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] korginator|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]