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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?
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
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.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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.
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.
Your experience sounds pretty similar to mine. My first computer was a TI99/4A, then I upgraded to a C=64, which I absolutely loved. Then, in 1993, I bought a Canon 486SX 33 MHz. No modem, no way to get online at that time. A while later, I purchased a modem (a BocaModem I believe), was given Trumpet by my ISP, and away we went...
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.
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
"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.
Also. Kermit and zmodem. THAT'S how the internet should have remained.
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
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.
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.
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.
I don't get why he didn't just require an internet connection before Trumpet would run...
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'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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
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
I use 7-zip for this purpose, however there's also a Windows version of Info-Zip if you'd prefer that.
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
I work for Charles Darwin University.
Is your school's biggest rival Oral Robert's Univesity?