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.

Allowed windows to get online?

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Wow, that's one early piece of malware ;)

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.

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.

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.

Re:mIRC

[hoggoth]

You didn't even remotely address the question. Out of those 32 million downloads, how many have paid for it?

DRM

[RoFLKOPTr]

I don't get why he didn't just require an internet connection before Trumpet would run...

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

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.