Peter Tattam created Trumpet Winsock and got very little: Let's set things right

I'm not really that familiar with WePay, but why not?

His normal email is p.tattam@gmail.com -- drop him a line and talk him through it.

Not sure. We Pay is ideally better for consumers, right? The donations are being made for what Peter made possible with Trumpet Winsock. I mean we are actually donating for his services and software, right? Sorry to go wayward, but just did not understand why We Pay and not Paypal would be a better option.

I dunno. I just guessed at $35, which would be on the high side of shareware pricing.

edit: looks like I guess pretty well.

I guess it would be reasonable to ask people pay the full $25 if they ever used a pirated copy of the software.

I think your calculations of inflation are off just a bit...

$25 + $13.37 = $38.37

With Paypal's history, I normally keep clearing them to my bank as they keep reaching a certain limit of say $1000. I mean I know it is stupid and misses the entire point of Paypal, but I would rather do this than my account being frozen.

> Thanks all... I had honestly thought the Internet had forgotten about me.

I don't think anybody can forget Trumpet. Trumpet is one of those pieces of software that is unique in that everybody has a warm memory about it, as evidenced by some of the great comments sprinkled throughout this thread and the previous one.

Since a Winsock implementation isn't really in need these days, what else have you been doing to keep yourself busy? I'm genuinely curious, and I'm sure a lot of other people stopping by the thread will be too.

(There was a comment about you in the previous thread that sounded fairly grim. If it's even a little accurate, I'm just all the more glad this happened.)

Thank you.

Ah, these kids today don't know anything - rest assured that Trumpet will never be forgotten, and I find it just flabbergasting to be able to say hi to you, and thanks.

Forgotten? Never! You're one of my tech heroes. Thank you so much.

I'm curious about something. I remember paying $25 to some store at BYU to get Trumpet Winsock. Did you get anything from those type of purchases? If not, I'll donate. I might donate something anyway. :)

This little gem of software enabled me to get online with my first PC at college, so thanks for writing it!

While Trumpet was not the first access I had to the net, I am happy to say that Trumpet was [representative of] the first good access that I had to the net. It was easy to get running and did not intimidate.

Like all great tools, no news was always good news!

Checking in from Toronto, Canada to say a hearty "thanks, Peter!"

I am probably too young to have used your software. Just one piece of advice, please keep withdrawing amount from your paypal account, on timely (probably daily) basis, there are way too many horror stories about it.

Peter, I distinctly remember the first time I installed trumpet and I realized that I could use more than one application over the same connection at once. Until then, I had been using BBSes or dialup connections that used Lynx for web accesss so there was no notion of using email and a web browser concurrently. Trumpet gave me the first "real" Internet connection. Thank you sir, for creating such a wonderful product. I was genuinely saddened to hear your story the other day. Hope this goes a little way toward correcting some past wrongs.

Not forgotten. I still remember your PetrOS project -- the premise made me quite excited at the time!

Without you, we would never have gotten Earthlink Network off the ground, for example. I forget - didn't Earthlink pay you a license fee, back in the day?

As a fellow Tasmanian, I can only tell you the awe I felt when I realised way back then (I used to dial into the University of Tasmania using Trumpet) that this great bit of software that _everyone used_ was written and developed by a person living in the same city as me.

Thanks!

Sometimes you pay it forward, but sometimes you pay it back.

Peter how could we forget you. For a lot of us you were the one giving us a head start in our careers!

Thanks! didi

Donated

HN is kicking Reddit's ass, actually.

The user base here is likely older.

I'd say get in touch with him by email. You might be able to do a bank transfer, a Western Union order or even, god forbid, send a cheque.

Another way to avoid PayPal fees is to 1) decide how much to give, 2) multiply it by six, and 3) decide by dice roll whether to give it.

Just a footnote. MacTCP was only available as part of an Apple site-license. However it was also commonly distributed illegally by ISPs and magazines. Most home Mac users on the internet prior to about 1996 probably inadvertently warezed it. (MacSLIP/MacPPP was freeware however.)

Not that I'm suggesting you donate to Apple anymore than you already do :)

There's no easy way to word what I came away from your comment with, so I'll just get it out there: your comment was exceedingly enlightening. I doubt that during the development of Trumpet anybody thought they were saving even one life (it's a sockets API!), and your story speaks volumes about how programmers can touch lives in ways they'd never imagine during development.

Moral I learned: it's really easy to underestimate impact. I'm personalizing that to relate to development, but I think it's applicable to a lot of what we do.

Thank you for sharing your story. Even though it wasn't directed at me, it gave me considerable pause and something to think about.

yours is not the only story. While not directly Trumpet Winsock related, I did write an IRC client for DOS, later ported to Windows. I used to spend some time online chatting with folks who had low self esteem and on occasions found myself counselling people whose only connection with reality was the Internet. For these people, the Internet was a lifeline without which they may well have committed suicide or otherwise gone to places where few return.

I am so glad you found peace and a greater sense of belonging to the world.

WePay doesn't work except in the US, which will do nought to get him money from outside the US, where he no doubt has fans to.

Besides if PayPal is that stupid, we can always post to reddit that PayPal is stealing the guys money. Should cause enough of a problem that they open it again.

A little bit of it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283693

Heh. I remember going to Tampa (my first ever trip to the States) to get that Dvorak Award, which is sitting on the equivalent of my mantelpiece (I'll take a photo to prove it!). BBS-CON was the conference. I remember shaking the hands of a good many people back then - little did I know how much the onslaught of Windows 95 would have on the market. I was told, flatteringly, by one industry observer at the time that Trumpet accelerated the Internet by about a year - who knows, but it certainly was a wake up call for M$ who really hadn't taken much notice of the Internet before then and was only interested in a vertical control over the industry by peddling their own network protocols. Writing Trumpet Winsock to published and open protocols was a testament to the beauty of openness.

And some trivia.... the name Trumpet was actually the first product I made, an Internet newsreader for DOS - as in a newspaper name like "The Daily Trumpet". Also I like trumpets, having played one for many years, and also the apocalyptic themes of the final trumpet sounding appealed to me too. As I was writing it in Turbo Pascal back then, there was no open source TCP stack in pascal, so I had to write one, from scratch, armed only with the RFCs. Ultimately that TCP core became Trumpet Winsock.

The Internet really was a wild western frontier back then, with so many things being done for the first time - it was a matter of who was the quickest to market and could anticipate what was needed. P!