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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.
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."
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.
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.
Value is not measured in hours, otherwise sports stars would be making about $10k/year. Creating software that allows millions of people to connect to the internet definitely provides value. I would certainly argue that a dollar a person is on the low side.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Peter alerted me to the comment. He says that it is completely untrue.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
You didn't even remotely address the question. Out of those 32 million downloads, how many have paid for it?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
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
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.
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