Trumpet Winsock

» see trumpet.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

trumpet winsock is the piece of software i would have needed two years earlier than i had a modem at all. when i dialed up for the first time at home in 1998 on a 14.4k modem, windows 98 was running and the tcp/ip stack was already in the box. the previous two years of people who got online from a windows 3.1 machine had to install trumpet first. it was the piece of software that came between the modem and the browser, and almost nobody paid for it.

peter tattam wrote it at the university of tasmania in hobart and released version 1.0a in 1994. the early internet was a unix and dos thing. windows 3.1 had no native tcp/ip support, so a casual user wanting to run netscape or mosaic on a normal home pc needed a third-party stack. trumpet was the one that worked. it dialed the modem and gave windows applications the sockets api they needed, with ppp or slip handling the link in between.

the shareware fee was around $25 and the documentation asked you to pay if you used it. one report estimated less than 1 percent of users actually did. ozemail in australia bundled a free copy with their consumer cd and was sued for stripping the registration prompt. trumpet ran in tens of millions of households over two years and tattam personally took home almost nothing.

windows 95 shipped in august 1995 with a bundled 32-bit tcp/ip stack and the question went away. trumpet released a 32-bit version in 1996 to chase the few users still on windows 3.x. by 1997, the install base was gone. in 2008 tattam moved the rights to tattam software enterprises and continued distributing it as a shareware download from a static site. nothing has shipped since.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

the technical job was tiny by 2026 standards. a vxd dialer that knew how to talk to a hayes-compatible modem and a winsock 1.1 dll that exposed berkeley sockets to applications, with slip or ppp in the middle. the whole package was a 250k download you could fit on a floppy and run in 1 megabyte of ram. that piece of code was what made the consumer internet possible on the dominant home operating system of 1994 and 1995.

~ the funny part ~

the funniest thing about trumpet is the order of operations of an early dial-up session. you booted windows 3.1, ran trumpet manually, typed your isp's number into a script window, watched the modem dial in characters, and only then could you launch netscape and start clicking. the abstraction of an always-on tcp/ip stack did not exist. the user knew where the connection was, every byte of it, because they had to start the process by hand.

~ the postmortem ~

microsoft shipped windows 95 with the same functionality bundled and free. there was no business case left. tattam released a 32-bit version in 1996 and took some enterprise contracts, but the shareware money never came in any volume. the brand was preserved on a small website by a company tattam controls, and the product is technically still available, but the moment ended in 1996.

~ the long tail ~

the early 1990s internet had a few of these load-bearing shareware products that got crushed when microsoft caught up. pkzip, winzip, qmodem, paint shop pro. trumpet sits at the top of that category because the gap it filled was the most fundamental. without trumpet, the windows 3.1 install base could not have reached the web in 1994 and 1995. tattam is still in hobart in 2026 and the back catalogue is still on his website. he never got paid.

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