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Trumpet Winsock Creator Made Little Money

Posted by timothy on from the change-that-if-you-care-to dept.

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."

1 of 358 comments (clear)

  1. Felt bad until I read this..... by ZosX · · Score: -1, Troll

    The first comment on the page:

    "* Alert - This is Not Really a good idea - do NOT send money *
    There was a court case on this. Peter made several million out of the settlement between him and M$ over Winsock. He used it to set up Trumpet Software international and the TrumpNet ISP. Trumpet Software created a number of ill-conceived software packages which did not sell, and burned all the capital. After splitting with his wife he lost a lot of money to her, and the TrumpNet business. His ex then destroyed Trumpnet by refusing to upgrade it to support ADSL and only supplying dial-up. Dont' be sucked in by this. A number of my friends worked fro TSI and I worked for TrumpNet at one point - so sad to watch it all die. Don't give Peter any more hard-earned money to lose."

    I'm guessing there is a kernel of truth to that. Also winsock was the worst tcp/ip stack I've ever had the displeasure of using. I never had to run it directly (thank god!), but in my experience with windows 3.1 systems, it was abysmal. It used to be the butt of many a joke. I really don't know if we should feel like we owe this guy anything.

    --
    zosxavius photography