Trumpet Winsock Creator Made Little Money

omast writes "It appears that Peter Tattam, creator of Trumpet Winsock, got very little for this piece of software. For those of you who do not remember — or did not need it because were already outside the MS Windows world — Trumpet Winsock was a shareware program that provided TCP/IP functionality to Windows machines back in 1994-1995. It allowed millions to connect to the Internet back then; I was one of them. According to the article, Tattam made very little money from the program as it was widely distributed but rarely paid for."

Comments

I remember! And I never paid either...

[singingjim1]

I always thought it was just a piece of accessory software that was provided to make Windows work. Never even considered it was supposed to cost money to use. And back then bulletin boards provided everything and anything you needed without the need for pesky "Keys" or registration.

Donation link from the article

[Anonymous Coward]

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

http://Paypal.com

Re:oh i see thats not considered shareware

[MrEricSir]

Actually he died of organ failure due to his alcoholism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz

But you may be right, PKWARE was pretty successful.

It was distributed on ISP disks, at no charge!

[urbanriot]

Back when it was widely used, I thought it was free piece of software as local internet providers were sending out disks (and later discs) with this software as part of their internet signup. Based on how many times I've installed it without realizing it for various people, I feel a little guilty over my naivete.

Re:It was distributed on ISP disks, at no charge!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ozemail distributed a modified version and arranged distribution via magazine cover disks.

This resulted in a copyright infringement case:
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/federal_ct/1996/560.html

Ozemail subsequently offered AU$500,000 + legal fees, which was accepted by Trumpet, according to:
  http://www.secinfo.com/dut49.71a2.htm

I don't know if $500,000 + other revenue streams counts as "little money".

Re:I didn't know it was shareware.

[tchuladdiass]

"Winsock" was Microsoft's specification for a Windows TCP/IP stack. Unfortunately, they didn't ship a dialup TCP/IP with Windows 3.1 (Windows for Workgroups included a Winsock, however that was for Ethernet only). So "Trumpet", a specific implementation of Winsock was written to fill in the gap, and provide a Winsock stack to Windows 3.1 / dialup users.

Re:I'm sure he did fine...

[h3llfish]

But why does he deserve millions of dollars? How many hours did he spend working on this software? I suspect not enough to justify a million dollar paycheck. If he hadn't written it, would someone else? Surely. So how big of a payday does he deserve? Obviously, there are a lot of people in this world who contribute little and get millions anyhow, so I would much rather see this guy be rich than some brainless beauty or Wall Street crook. But the best of all possible worlds would be one where people are paid a fair amount for a day's work.

mIRC

[westlake]

Traditional shareware, I mean. Has anyone ever made a living off of it?

mIRC chart is a classic $20 shareware program, introduced in 1995, now at. v7.17.

32 million dowloads from CNET's Download.com (since Dec 2010), currently about 125,000 downloads a week from CNET alone.

TreeCardGames's SolSuite Solitaire (now at v 11.2) is another example, with about 4,000 downloads a week from Download.com.

He would have made more...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

If it wasn't for the mindless bug in the trial period timer. On the 60 day trial version, you could set the date on your machine to current+10 years, install it, run it once, set the date back to current and have a trial period of 10years+60 days. I did it. And I wasn't the only one.

Updates to story

[Jacques Chester]

I'm the guy at HN who started the appeal, including the related website. See this thread for updates. In summary, in light of the hundreds of donations, Peter has issued an amnesty for all individual users of Trumpet Winsock up to the end of 2012.

Re:oh i see thats not considered shareware

[dHeinemann]

There's an article you can read about Phil Katz' life here, entitled "The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz". The poor bloke had a pretty rough life.

Then he was found dead April 14, Phil Katz was slumped against a nightstand in a south side hotel, cradling an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps. The genius who built a multimillion-dollar software company known worldwide for its pioneering "zip" files had died of acute pancreatic bleeding caused by chronic alcoholism.

Re:Felt bad until I read this.....

[PTrumpet]

just for the record folks... I just posted this in response...

"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."

As for starting up, Trumpet Software grew out a lounge room from shareware regs alone, not with a huge cash injection from a court settlement or any VC $$$.

As for some of the other stuff, there's a fair bit of personal stuff which would be inappropriate for me to discuss, except it almost broke me to have to resign my position in the business in 2004 because of the divorce proceedings. There are also some other inaccuracies in the statements you made, but as you can understand it is just not appropriate for me to discuss the ugliness of the divorce proceedings and settlement in public (except to say it took almost 7 years through the courts, the longest case in Hobart I have been told).

Peter T

Re:Why wait til now to pursue possible legal actio

[Jacques Chester]

He's not. This is a spontaneous donation drive for which I am personally responsible. I work for Charles Darwin University. You can look me up on their website and call me right now to confirm my identity if you like. Or rely on the fact that I've been on Slashdot for more than a decade.

http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/

[billstewart]

Peter's email for Paypal donations is payments@petertattam.com, or the guy who wrote the article about it set up http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/ and you can go read the Back Story page on it.

And, yeah, Trumpet was what you used if you wanted your Windows machine to actually connect successfully to dialup IP back in the day.