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Thanks for Trumpet Winsock

thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com

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Re: Thanks for Trumpet Winsock

#41

Post by jlgaddis »

peckrob wrote: post #3

Oh man, the memories. For people who have grown up in a hyper-connected always-online world, it's hard to explain the pure joy of hearing the sound of your computer picking up the phone and sending those tones [0]. Because it meant going from isolated, disconnected and unitary to being part of a wider world. Suddenly, everything was at your fingertips and it was intoxicating to me as a teenager. Fire up Trumpet Winso…

> those tones

http://evilrouters.net/56k.mp3 (MP3)

It's my ring tone. I love the weird looks on people's faces when I'm in a meeting and my phone rings -- especially the "older" crowd (some of the "youngsters" don't recognize the sound).

Re: Thanks for Trumpet Winsock

#44

Post by marpstar »

My absolute earliest memory of going on the internet was my grade school librarian firing up Trumpet Winsock on some Windows 3.1 machine when I was in second grade (circa 1995). He navigated to nfl.com and then printed the website out.

I remember thinking "this is pointless" but went on to build my first web pages only a few years later (4th or 5th grade).

Re: Thanks for Trumpet Winsock

#45

Post by jlgaddis »

peckrob wrote: post #3

Oh man, the memories. For people who have grown up in a hyper-connected always-online world, it's hard to explain the pure joy of hearing the sound of your computer picking up the phone and sending those tones [0]. Because it meant going from isolated, disconnected and unitary to being part of a wider world. Suddenly, everything was at your fingertips and it was intoxicating to me as a teenager. Fire up Trumpet Winso…

And let's not forget the great times that could be had by joining any large channel on IRC and sending a single command:

  /CTCP #channel PING +++ATH0
Interestingly enough, I tried it again a few months ago and was shocked to discover that it apparently still works.

Re: Thanks for Trumpet Winsock

#47

Post by santavaca »

ryan-allen wrote: post #15
gww wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, MUDs I have not thought about the one I spent my teenage years playing until you mentioned them. I just checked and to my surprise it is still online. Too bad it looks like no one plays anymore.

MUDs are still a thing! There are heaps of little bespoke ones here and there, and lots of resources on Reddit [0]. I played one called Major Mud back in the day. When World of Warcraft came out, I thought, it's about time! [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/ EDIT: Check out this MUD, which won MUD of the Month on the subreddit above: http://www.luminarimud.com/FMud/FMud.html

MajorMud had such great community support around it: Turbosentry's BBS crawling top list, Blood2HTML capture utility, MMudExplorer, Jigg's maps, Kotar's maps, the forums...suffice to say MajorMud was my late 90s and early 2000s stomping ground, transitioning from dial-up to telnet.

Re: Thanks for Trumpet Winsock

#48

Post by jlgaddis »

marpstar wrote: post #44

My absolute earliest memory of going on the internet was my grade school librarian firing up Trumpet Winsock on some Windows 3.1 machine when I was in second grade (circa 1995). He navigated to nfl.com and then printed the website out. I remember thinking "this is pointless" but went on to build my first web pages only a few years later (4th or 5th grade).

You just reminded me... I recently discovered that a website I made when I was a teenager is still online. I could still remember my username, was able to login, and was shocked to see the date stamps on the directory listing. The oldest file there is dated 19 May 1997 [0]. I intend to celebrate its 20th birthday in another ~16 months.

[0]: There's actually one slightly older (28 Apr 1997), but it's an image (.gif), not a .html file.

Re: Thanks for Trumpet Winsock

#49

Post by kazinator »

> Do you remember connecting to the Internet in 1994 or 1995?

In 1993 I was already using Linux, with an actual TCP/IP stack, not some bolted-on thing. In 1994 I was doing contract work on Linux already. One of the jobs was for these guys, still chugging along:

http://www.infomine.com/

They employed a group of full-time people who continuously gathered new information about mining prospecting going on around the world, stuffing it into a database. This was turned into periodically refreshed web pages, for which subscribers could "click to pay". I hacked the CERN httpd to lock the click-to-pay data, and whipped up a billing system for invoicing customers. (Spat out TeX -> dvi -> laserjet: most beautiful invoices anyone ever got for anything.) I made a nice visual control menu for the whole system using a C program and ncurses, and even Yacc was used on the project for something.

One of the genius programmers on the database side claimed that "OMG, Linux causes data loss", because when the hundreds of megs of generated HTML was copied over to the servers (Linux ext2 FS), the disk usage was way lower than on the FAT. Haha!

In 1995 I got an Asus motherboard with two Pentium 100 processors, and ran Linux 1.3.x with early SMP support (big kernel lock heavily used). make -j 3 was only 27% faster than make.

Re: Thanks for Trumpet Winsock

#50

Post by jlgaddis »

peckrob wrote: post #3

Oh man, the memories. For people who have grown up in a hyper-connected always-online world, it's hard to explain the pure joy of hearing the sound of your computer picking up the phone and sending those tones [0]. Because it meant going from isolated, disconnected and unitary to being part of a wider world. Suddenly, everything was at your fingertips and it was intoxicating to me as a teenager. Fire up Trumpet Winso…

Ahhh, memories... Ewan (telnet), Eudora (SMTP/POP3), FreeAgent (NNTP), WS_FTP (FTP), and, of course, writing the pre-requisite .cmd login scripts.

At first, though, dial-up Internet access was a long-distance phone call so mostly I'd use a free Juno account (e-mail only with free dial-up numbers) and do as much as I could via e-mail (including abusing the FTP-by-email gateways).

Before Juno, I paid a local BBS for e-mail access (they would dial up their gateway once a day, between 0400-0500 and do a UUCP transfer -- FidoNet transfers happened during the same "maintenance period"). I would dial in, upload the e-mail I had composed offline, download my new mail, and disconnect before reading it. Blue Wave 2.12 QWK offline mail reader. I'll never forget it.

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