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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."
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.
Traditional shareware, I mean. Has anyone ever made a living off of it?
I know there's plenty of "crippleware" or game demos that claim to be shareware, but traditional shareware involved giving the product away for free and then begging for money. (Sort of like public radio.)
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Trumpet Winsock was provided to us (though I don't recall if it was hosted or just a link) by Ohio State when I was a freshman there. I definitely didn't pay for it, but it got me started into the world of networking and TCP/IP.
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
had something to do with shareware.
or so im told.
Wow, that's one early piece of malware ;)
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
i have no idea. the guy who made pkzip died waist deep in a pile of hoarder trash or something.
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
I don't remember what I bought but I remember I had to mail a payment to Australia to get it
Bought my first "modern" computer in Dec. 1994 - 1 piece Compaq Pressario long before the iMac, bought first computer in 1983, had to hook it to a tv and it ran off cassettes, still may be in my parents basement ;-) . I tried all the online companies of the time and still remember laughing at the "trumpet" and "wind"sock. Don't remember paying for any software, spent all my money on 4mg RAM.
Yeah, I had no idea it was supposed to cost money either.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
once you consider the fact that it must have been pretty lucrative to have "author of Winsock" on his resume. Not all of the financial rewards of creating something are direct, and not all are financial.
Reminds me of Simon Tatham, creator of PuTTY.
You know why: because you're a newbie who hasn't heard of 7-Zip, or because it's the mid nineties and it hasn't been invented yet. What were you hoping to accomplish with your post, besides annoying people?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
It's the problem with the redistributed freeware model. While everyone is working their 9 to 5 jobs and using the software the guys spending their time writing it aren't making a living. Once they repost the software the chain is broken and the poor writer goes unpaid. Years ago I had this happen with Winzip where I actually paid for it but it wasn't the original writer selling it so he got stiffed. I got more careful after that episode.
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.
I thought it was Microsoft's branding of TCP/IP Sockets - I thought it was an MS product. All those books on programming TCP for Windows were called Programming Winsock or something. I didn't program sockets until Win 95 so I didn't have to deal with Winsock itself - I just used the books written about it to program later versions of Windows sockets.
The code worked perfectly, btw ....
Isn't that interesting ....
I haven't programmed down on the socket layer in Windows in years, so I have no idea if that's still the case.
Trumpet was a great solution for tinkerers and enabled many of us to get on the "net". Not sure why you have to crap on it so bad however I feel bad for anyone that had to support anything on win31.
Zoid.com
Maybe I misremember, but ISTR that the unregistered version was supposed to kick you off your connection after a certain time.
OTOH, maybe that's just Windows 3.1 I'm remembering.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I'm pretty sure there was a splash screen or nag screen of some kind. Can't remember, but I sure as heck knew it was.
But now I'm feeling guilty about all those years of freeloading Telix to dial into the local BBSes.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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.
The worst part about it was before we got the custom solution, we absorbed an ISP of "elite" Win3.1 users who all had 2 phone lines, so we couldn't ask them to go away and try some setting - they've be all "oh, hang on, I can try that right now". Crappy Win3.1 modem drivers did so much to add to the joyous experience. If USRobotics and ( to a lesser extent ) the other external modem vendors hadn't been so overpriced, they could have done the world a favor and rid us of all those PoS internal modems especially those damned Winmodems and the accursed IBM MWave ( GAAAAAHHHH!!!!)
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I was using an Amiga back then.
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.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Seems like a more than fair deal. :-)
Or at least, that's what my wife and I like to tell ourselves about our GPL'd garden simulator (a six person-year labor of love around the same time period):
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
There have always been four different economies throughout human history:
* A subsistence economy ("There's some lovely berries over here.");
* A gift economy ("The meat from this deer is going to spoil; let's share it with the tribe.");
* A planned economy ("Let's put the longhouse here.");
* An exchange economy ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.");
Their relative balance shifts with changes to culture, technology, and other circumstances.
See also the comment I made here:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
So, we can expect the balance between those four economies to change as our technology and society changes, perhaps with:
* A subsistence economy through 3D printing and local PV solar panels or other clean energy technologies (like cold fusion or something else);
* A gift economy through the internet, like sharing digital files to use with our 3D printers;
* A planned economy on a variety of scales, including through taxes, subsidies and regulation affecting market dynamics; and
* An exchange economy marketplace softened by a basic income.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
We bought a license to deploy it at a company I worked for in 1997. It worked well for us. Supposedly he was writing an OS that was Windows Compatible, but I never heard anything about it. No screenshots or anything.
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.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
You know what really sucks? The fact that I have as many or more issues setting up a machine today than I did back then. Today everything is buggy bloatware that wants to dial home and every time you blink you find some strange windows error that requires googling to find a solution. My latest laptop - a Qosmio X500 I had to downgrade Zonealarm, Virtualbox and the Antivirus. Zonealarm broke remote desktop. Virtualbox broke local network sharing. Antivirus is too new (version 2 of MS Security Essentials) to be recognised as valid to log into a VPN I use AND turns on Windows update for you without asking.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
No joke. I lived in Santa Cruz and knew people at TGV so I had the TGV stack for Windows 3.1, it was actually seriously fast. We had a nice little 10baseT network in the house and a 28.8k CSLIP with a /24. Those were the days...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Peter alerted me to the comment. He says that it is completely untrue.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
Sometimes I wish I could retract comments on slashdot. I don't know why someone would post something that would smear him if it were untrue.
zosxavius photography
That's life (or Slashdot, almost the same). In the meantime you can point people to the website and the followup thread: http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303337
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
but I think you needed to pay to get all the maps in Quake 1.
Other shareware works with all or most parts with just nag screens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Tattam
This is most unfortunate.
I don't get why he didn't just require an internet connection before Trumpet would run...
"very little" - what's that in $$'s?
I remember my first isp giving me two disks to use on our 3.1 486. And having to run out and buy a copy of Windows 95 and another 16 meg of ram to make it work! So getting on the net wound up costing me an extra 200 bucks. When I upgraded to a new computer the next week after finding that IE (Mosiac) or Nutscrape would not work for more than 30 minutes without crashing the stack I decided to try Linux!
It was a revelation. Using ifconfig and ifup was a breeze compared to the nonsense of having an unreliable windowing gui. Understanding how to create a script has been invaluable. So ever since my first 2000 dollar Windows experience setting up a network configuration I have always had at least one version of Linux around to make sure that we can always get on the net.
That said if it were not for those disks from our ISP my wife and daughter would never been able to get on the net and the use of MS office for work communication would have been even more expensive than it was back then. Essentially the non gui scripted version of trumpet winsock was the only way to keep Windows on the net at all.
The original Microsoft network stack gui was a train wreck and did not do dos batch worth beans the way that good old piece of shareware could! Until the second service pack of Windows 95 the use of something other than Netscape Navigator and Trumpet Winsock was essential unless you really were a sucker for punishment. About this time the whole virus and malware crap started...Funny but I never had any trouble before Internet Exploiter 3 and LOOKout Express! Before that you could not keep Windows network software on the net long enough for anything dangerous to happen anyway.
While I certainly would feel bad for anyone who lost out on millions of licenses, why wait until 10-15 years later to pursue legal action against large companies and ISPs who distributed illegally?
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
It's been so long, I can't even recall all the details anymore. But honestly, I thought it was a situation where some early version of Trumpet Winsock didn't require a payment to use it (though maybe the documentation asked for it if you kept using the program?), but later versions added the registration requirement?
I just have some vague recollection of everyone using an older (and more buggy) version of Trumpet that was handed out on disks provided by colleges and universities for their students to get online. And when we'd find newer, better versions to download, they always had those timers in them preventing using it more than so many minutes at a time or whatever, so we'd get frustrated and go back to the older one.
He replied just above you, here's your golden opportunity.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
Update: that comment has since been deleted by its author after being corrected by Peter Tattam.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
We had MacTCP and Open Transport. I remember an hackish program called Butt Trumped that was supposedly able to crash computers using the unregistered version of Trumped Windsock. I just never gave enough of a damn to try to get anyone's IP address.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
I remember back when I had a (work supplied) 386 running SCO Unix* - when they replaced it with a 486, I was allowed to keep the old beastie... so at my missus' insistence, I installed a dual-boot - Yggdrasil Linux (I know), with the other option being DOS and Windows 3.1. Had a crap modem on it (seriously, 2400 baud), but discovered that getting online wasn't so easy in 'doze... The Linux side gave me an easy SLIP connection and let me do what I wanted. To get the ;doze side going online, a buddy coughed up an old copy of Trumpet Winsock for me. Worked online just fine after that (but hella slow until I replaced the modem w/ a 14.4k... took anywhere from 30 minutes for a typical website to load on 2400 baud :) ).
Anyrate, I figured I should cough up for it (yeah, 17 years later, but...) No idea what he was originally asking, else I'd just chip in that. Anyone know offhand?
* (the old, good SCO, not the Darl-flavored litigious bastards)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I remember this, and I think I paid for it, though finding proof would be difficult at this point. I was just so thankful for something that worked.
Meh.
the worst part of Winzip is that Corel got their hands on it. IMO I'd almost say that their best move would have been to drag MS to court over integrated zip file handling in the same way Netscape did, especially since Corel had case law on their side to boot. Instead, they attempted to keep enticing upgraders with release after release that just did more and more useless stuff. Now, it's essentially turned into Norton Utilities.
WinDVD is the same way, and they don't really offer a 'lite' version either. ugh. I'm convinced that Corel can't churn out efficient code to save its life.
I ditched Zonealarm almost 10 years ago when it started spontaneously rebooting a Win2K machine of mine and while I initially like M$ Security Essentials, that forced Windows patching was a dealbreaker so back to AVG I went. I use VirtualBox but haven't hit the local network sharing - what version do you have?
But I take your point - the software of the present makes the machines of the future as slow and frustrating as the ones of the past.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I knew... I think I used it too. Makes me feel guilty now... back in those days, I was way more poor than I am now. (Still barely getting by but not as bad as back then... guess I'll look this guy up and send him some money or something.)
Hey H3llfish,
We don't question why people should have what they have here. That's class warfare. Today it's the shareware guy, tomorrow it's some kid who got expelled from Harvard for theft. People who have more money than you, no matter how they got it, have it because they're better than you. They're smarter, better-looking, harder-working and God flat-out loves them more than you. We don't need your whining jealously around here.
Remember, if you feed the poor, you're a saint, but if you ask why the poor have no food, you're just a jealous, whining, class-warrior Communist who should be taken out and shot.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
PSP in particular is a great example of OTHER ways to make money. For years PSP CDs were included with graphic cards, pen tablets, mice and other peripherals. This provides licensing income without having to worry abot the "shareware" aspect of it. Some graphics cards even came with a registered copy on the CD, which added substantial value back in the days when the only competition was a $400 copy of Photoshop.
BTW I did pop 35 bucks for pkware - unfortunately it was only months before Katz' death.
I most certainly paid for my copy of Trumpet Winsock. Even after Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11 could be upgraded with the "Wolverine" Winsock implementation I still preferred the better Trumpet version until Windows 95 came around.
The best legend I heard about Microsoft Wolverine was when a bunch of middle managers were leaving a "Bill" meeting, one of them groaned to the other, "Now I have to go find out what TCP/IP means."
Even so, Wolverine didn't know about dialup PPP so Trumpet was still the winner.
Kriston
How many of you still haven't paid your $699.00 per processor licensing fee?
I actually paid for it, by mailing a check, I think. That was back when I was in my "Gosh the internet is NEAT" phase and I actually sent money to shareware authors so the wonderful hippie ethic of the net would continue and rainbows and unicorns would eventually appear, or something, Anyway, I'm glad I did. It's weird, but Trumpet Winsock popped into my mind the other day, probably because I saw that James Gleik has a new book out and I remembered using his Pipeline service with its dodgy "Pink Slip" emulator.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
It's Economics 101. People won't pay for what they can get for free, unless there's a substantial convenience or hassle-avoidance (legal, malware) factor thrown in. They talk about supporting open source and musicians who offer free downloads, but that's all it is - lip service. Oh, and "I once donated $20, or was it $50, no it was definitely $100 to such and such a musician". Yeah, so maybe you did. A long time ago.
So dam'd sure, are you? I just donated to the Trumpet author 5 mins ago... couldn't afford to pay for it at those times but I'm glad the story was posted on /.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
If he put up a paypal donation link, and a page saying "I wrote Trumpet Windsock. Please donate if you used it without paying", I wonder what he'd take in.
This wasn't "freeware". It was shareware. A commercial product.
I never really liked that model, mostly because it only ever seemed to exist on the PC. Everywhere else the world was content to give software for free. But on PC I just saw far to people with the mindset that if you used a computer you deserved to get paid for it; including some people who would attach readme files to buggy junk that read "I learned to program while writing this, you owe me $20 if you run it once".
Of course there were a few good shareware programs, some of which did not even have free alternatives. Trumpet Winsock was one of those, if you were unfortunate enough to be stuck on a PC as your only internet capable machine.
"my work for something like Cancer, or MS?"
If you can come up with a cure for Microsoft, the whole of civilization will owe you something. And curing cancer would be almost as good.
I had always thought it was provided by Microsoft.
Admittedly, I was on a Mac at the time. But even I knew what Trunpet Winsock was, and that everyone needed to use it.
Donated. Good luck, sir.
The ______ Agenda
http://www.google.com/search?q=free+unzip
Guess which program is the first result?
Phil Karn's KA9Q and MIT PC/IP both predated it. MIT PC/IP was commercialized into FTP Software, Inc., and supplied Microsoft in 1996.
http://www.ka9q.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTP_Software
I remember Bob Wallace, founder of Quicksoft, author of PC-Write, and pretty much the inventor of shareware marketing, despite Andrew Fluegelman releasing PC-Talk first. Bob was one of the few people who "got it", although the software industry has ironically not recovered from his usability choices.
It was a conversation at a conference in the 1980's. Bob said "I don't sell software; software is all up here", motioning with his hands around his temples; "I sell manuals".
Bob did this by putting enough functionality in his product that people felt it was worth paying for, and he made it obscure enough that it really was not that useful without a manual, and he sold manuals cheaply enough that it was easier to buy them (and get a disk at the same time) than it was to print them out on tractor feed fan-fold paper.
Software still hasn't recovered its usability from the intentional/unnecessary complexity caused by shareware authors. The problem for Trumpet Winsock was it pretty much had nothing to sell beyond what was available already, and it didn't have anyone over a barrel for documentation. I made the same mistake with my own shareware once upon a time, and made pretty much nothing on it as well. Live and learn.
-- Terry
WinZip is the best-known archive extractor on the planet. It's twenty years old and was one of the first GUIs for PKZIP/PKUNZIP, if not the first. Further, it's the first hit on Google for "unzip", and the second for "zip". Finally, it's notorious for being nagware. How is it possible that you have a UID lower than mine and don't know this, or that the AC was making light of it?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Winamp MP3 Player was originally freeware, but the author's mom told him he should really try offering it as shareware. Lots of people paid $10 in return for a player that they used for a lot of music that they didn't pay for :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Solid as a rock for me. Out of interest... what were the alternatives at the time, and what did they cost?
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Gosh, well we used Windows 3.1, and 3.11, and 95 in our household, but we didn't get an Internet connection until Windows 98. Damn you BT metered dial up.
I was writing shareware from about 1991, when you had to chose it from a catalogue and got it on floppies, then people paid for shareware. Then CDs were becoming cheap, people bought the CD and had a ton of software available, and people also stopped paying fees. Ask most people and they think that shareware = freeware. Saddly may companies often have terminal apps the are shareware but they have never paid for it. Sad really.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
it was a very short span when it made sense to use it, too. and there were others.
however, I can't imagine the guy having stayed "poor" due to this, from the tfa "At the time I didn't have two 50c coins to rub together. Today, partly due to that early internet exposure, I am a well-paid software engineer.". well, that applied to a lot of us, except I wouldn't count myself as well paid, paid more than janitors and such yeah.. but not as well paid as the guys who weren't 14 in 1995 - the trumpet winsock guy could have scored a lot of good gigs based on that one shareware piece. and I mean a lot of good gigs in the bubble era.
besides, did linus get paid directly? not quite, but you'd be a fool if you said that linux didn't bring him money and a career.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'd donate something to this guy because his software did open windows ( which I was sadly using at the time ) to realtime networking. However I'm not going to donate via paypal only to watch with a total lack of surprise when paypal lock the account and keep all the money.
Probably not much. Shareware never really worked for the developers. Most people are just greedy bastards.
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
A useful site.. I think like a lot of other people I used it when I was skint, but I'm not now! Couldn't have used the internet without it!
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Thanks Peter, you made a huge contribution to the world. Small donation made... wish it could be more.
How many of you still haven't paid your $699.00 per processor licensing fee?
Wake up moderators, trolls abound.
While I certainly would feel bad for anyone who lost out on millions of licenses, why wait until 10-15 years later to pursue legal action against large companies and ISPs who distributed illegally?
That's not what is going on at all. The guy wrote something many of us remember fondly, another guy thought it would be nice to do something for him as he got bugger all thanks at the time.
so the wonderful hippie ethic of the net would continue and rainbows and unicorns would eventually appear, or something.
Have you visited The Daily WTF recently? :-D
Right. I was new to PCs and naive, but it was even clear to me that it was supposed to be paid for and that my friendly neighborhood BBS offered it "cracked" so that anybody could use it--just as they did with plenty of other software.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Probably something to do with having to buy a copy of Windows after to run their Windows applications and then finding out the Apple logo didn't protect them.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
There has been reactions from the owner of the software
http://tattsoft.com/
http://petertattam.com/?p=33
Including an amnesty
As a gesture of good will, Peter Tattam, the sole copyright owner of Trumpet Winsock, has also issued an amnesty on any copyright infringement by individual unlicensed users of Trumpet Winsock until at least 31st Dec 2012, at which time he expects to continue that amnesty. He does however reserve all other rights in the copyright of Trumpet Winsock.
I wish he would be open sourcing it or calling for a donation threshold to do so, but still a nice gesture.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The company I was working for at the time rolled out several thousand desktops with Trumpet in the early 1990s, all fully licenced and for a very fair price. However, our purchasing department spent months trying to get in touch with Tattam to get a quote then later, to arrange payment and licencing. He rarely answered his email and when he did, often didn't answer the questions he was asked. We persisted and the end result was very successful but I can see why others might just shrug and say "It's shareware" and install.
Let's be honest here, back in those days most people didn't even know that software costs money. It was something you got on unlabeled discs from a buddy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I get CAM UnZip as the first result here. I've never even heard of it.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Shareware was also extremely popular on classic Mac OS and at least in early OS X. Lots of very high quality software (including games), too, much of which would have been straight commercial releases on Windows.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
You fail at reading.
FTA "My first experience connecting to the internet was using Windows 3.1, Trumpet Winsock and Netscape 1.22 (I think) to browse the nascent web. Later I wiled away (too many) hours on IRC.
At the time I didn't have two 50c coins to rub together. Today, partly due to that early internet exposure, I am a well-paid software engineer."
Over the past 20 years i've written about a dozen pieces of shareware. Open sourced several programs too. The part that was important to me was that people find my software useful or fun. I do it because I enjoy the work, not because I want to get rich.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Shareware was also extremely popular on classic Mac OS and at least in early OS X. Lots of very high quality software (including games), too, much of which would have been straight commercial releases on Windows.
Actually, the concept of "shareware" was created first with the Mac terminal application "RedRyder" ( back then we called them "programs", sonny!). Distributed and marketed solely by word-of-mouth and what we would call "trial downloads" on CompuServe (still want to put a $ sign in their name!) and other BBSes. The author wrote about coming home from a week's vacation shortly after publishing RedRyder only to find his apartment effectively carpeted with envelopes with checks in them. And with that, the concept of "shareware" was born.
For a long time, he was the only SUCCESSFUL shareware (he coined the term!) publisher; but after awhile that changed, and the Mac community still enjoys a very healthy (MUCH more so than on Windows) shareware catalog. In fact, most independently-distributed Mac apps are shareware (and a lot are freeware now, too).
I work for Charles Darwin University.
Is your school's biggest rival Oral Robert's Univesity?
The maps weren't really worth much. I completed episode 1 of Quake, but the single player game was so tedious that I was bored before the end and I never got more than a couple of levels into the others before tedium set in. More importantly was the fact that the thunderbolt and some of the textures and models that mods used were not present in the shareware version. If you wanted to play Team Fortress, for example, you needed the registered version.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I knew all about shareware, but I don't remember ever seeing anything that suggested paying for Trumpet WinSock.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Actually, the concept of "shareware" was created first with the Mac terminal application "RedRyder" ( back then we called them "programs", sonny!).
PC-Talk was a terminal program written in BASIC, is well known to be the first shareware program as it was freeware but asked for donations, and its distribution was in fact simply the .BAS source code (so it was also open source in 1982.)
You've got your history mixed up, young man.
"His name was James Damore."
Mindspring, and whatever it was called before it was Mindspring, included Trumpet Winsock on the install disk, if I recall correctly. Does this mean I paid for it, or did they steal it and give it to me?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
And on the Mac System 6 I think we used MacPPP; also a third party shareware. http://www.vintagemacworld.com/sys6net.html
According to this Slashdot post, the settlement was for A$500,000 (with references provided). That was only one revenue stream.
Anyways, all things considered with software piracy, it sounds like you had at least a moderate amount of success. Kind of crazy that 15 years later people feel the need to donate.
I don't think MacPPP was shareware. It was written by Merit systems, IIRC, which released pretty much all of their software for free. There was a shareware PPP stack for System 7 I think, but you only needed it if you were doing something weird, otherwise you could just use FreePPP.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
"Software still hasn't recovered its usability from the intentional/unnecessary complexity caused by shareware authors."
I can assure you, unnecessary complexity was not invented by shareware. :-)
They may have been innovative in turning that into a revenue source, though.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I paid for and used a copy of Trumpet a lot. Although I probably used it on 3 or 4 different PCs, one at a time, over the course of a couple years.
I somehow avoided Trumpet Winsock for the most part. I used Compuserve and moved to OS/2 about that time which allowed me to use OS/2 for most of my dialup needs. I also used Injoy for OS/2 to share my connection on my network. Later, I bought a dedicated network modem dialer unit which along with Injoy allowed the move to ethernet a bit sooner than most. Strange that the just the right combination of technologies can skirt around another almost entirely.
The few times I did have to use Winsock, it usually came with the disk from the ISP. The small ISPs used an older version and never mentioned any need to pay for it. That seemed to be the business model for many small non-AOL/Compuserve systems.
To this day I thought WinSock was a Microsoft thing. I mean, I was young teen back then, but still. Maybe this guy should have marketed better?
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This wasn't "freeware". It was shareware. A commercial product.
I never really liked that model, mostly because it only ever seemed to exist on the PC. Everywhere else the world was content to give software for free. But on PC I just saw far to people with the mindset that if you used a computer you deserved to get paid for it; including some people who would attach readme files to buggy junk that read "I learned to program while writing this, you owe me $20 if you run it once".
"freeware" was, at one point, a name for the business model that became known as "shareware"... Neither term is really properly descriptive, if you think about it.
I hear ya with regard to the "PC mindset". I always hated that on Windows or Mac, if there was some useful bit of functionality that was somehow missing, someone would be there to charge you money for it. For instance, the game emulator (NES emulator, I think?) I had on my Powerbook (OSX 10.3, around 2004) was free (because the original author licensed it as such) but the guy who ported it to Mac decided to charge extra for the module that let you use a USB gamepad with it... All kinds of little things came with little fees attached. There was kind of a similar issue on PalmOS: because there were lots of things you might want to do that weren't provided in the OS already, there were lots of niches for people to write cheap (but not free), and very simple applications to exploit those niches.
But as a Linux user I think I developed the opposite problem: I developed the mindset that software wasn't something that should be paid for. Why pay for Paint Shop Pro when GIMP is free? Why pay for Word when Openoffice is free? And so on. Personally I think this led me to under-value software, and avoid software that had to be paid for. I think it's a healthier approach than what i did when I ran DOS and Windows (i.e. not paying for software, but running software for which payment was expected) - I wasn't taking anything that wasn't being offered for free, but I think the expectation that good stuff should be free is a bit unhealthy if taken too far.
I think the really bad thing about getting "nickled and dimed" was that, in the cases I was dealing with, it was generally very simple stuff that people were charging for. The threshold, of how much capability you could expect to get for no cost beyond getting on the platform, was very low. That's changed a lot over the years: operating systems come with simple video editors, free photo editors of GIMP's caliber are pretty common, and so on... And so there's a higher threshold for what people can successfully charge money for. At least on most platforms. (I think with new platforms in general it takes a little while for this threshold to rise up to a reasonable level again...)
Bow-ties are cool.
I remember Winsock. I used to tote it around on a 3.5" floppy. Similarly I kept an HFS floppy with MacTCP for the Mac System 6 crowd.
I do confess that I never paid a penny for Winsock. I feel guilty, now...
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Ahhh, that brings back memories. Trumpet was good for the dial-up but not so good on the LAN (I can't remember why though).
So when we (a 10 PC small business with no real IT skills) set up our first proxy (Wingate) in the mid 90's, we ended up using Wolverine on our 3.11 machines.
That stuff seems all so cringlingly primitive now :)
MS Security Essentials does not force Windows Update to run, you just failed to change the default settings.
Yeah, if I remember correctly, the packet sizes or windows couldn't really be configured in a way that made it work well on a LAN, but it was spectacular on a modem.
Oddly, Wolverine had the opposite problem.
Cheers.
Kriston
Nobody I knew paid separately for connectivity software back then - you chose an ISP and bought their package or your used one of the AOL floppies that came in the mail every week.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Actually, the concept of "shareware" was created first with the Mac terminal application "RedRyder" ( back then we called them "programs", sonny!).
PC-Talk was a terminal program written in BASIC, is well known to be the first shareware program as it was freeware but asked for donations, and its distribution was in fact simply the .BAS source code (so it was also open source in 1982.)
You've got your history mixed up, young man.
If so, I stand corrected. Maybe it was only the TERM "shareware" that the author of RedRyder (later called White Knight) coined.
Not so fast. This page says it happened in two places simultaneously -- PC-File being the other program.
I come here for the love
So True! I was one of them as well! I just thought it was a DLL I needed to get TCP/IP traffic. Of course, I was 14, so registration, keys, or anything of the sort was far from my mind. Plus, BBSs were all about shareware/freeware/warez in my circles. I didn't even see the value it FidoNet back then... not 'till the WWW was around did I truly see the value of a wide scale network.
M
Browse at 1. You'll thank me later.