It is not too late to register your Trumpet Winsock.

[sandorspruit@mastodon.nl]

@gloriouscow @hpcchris Oh wow, there’s a blast from the past! 😳

[hpcchris@scholar.social]

@sandorspruit @gloriouscow Indeed. Supported it in my first job at an ISP.

[gloriouscow@oldbytes.space]

@vampiress My friend who had some connections to the warez scene had been running a Chicago beta for a while and hyping up how great it was, so I picked it up pretty much as soon as it came out.

We still had a 386DX-40. Installation took a while.

[christopherkunz@chaos.social]

@gloriouscow Right after finally buying that license for pkzip.exe!

[sandorspruit@mastodon.nl]

@hpcchris @gloriouscow Back in the day, when Bill Gates thought Internet would not really be a thing, and you needed third party utilities to make things work. What if…

[gloriouscow@oldbytes.space]

@christopherkunz Phil Katz passed in 2000 :(

PKWARE lives on apparently, but I feel no moral compulsion to throw money at them.

But if you feel differently, it's only $31.90!

https://www.pkware.com/products/store

[gloriouscow@oldbytes.space]

@christopherkunz and don't forget mIRC

https://www.mirc.com/register.html

[jernej__s@infosec.exchange]

@gloriouscow I only got internet access in early '96, and by then I already had Windows 95. I did see Trumpet at a friend a few months earlier, but never used it personally.

[yuki2501@masto.hackers.town]

@gloriouscow aw, Trumpet Winsock! 😃

Nostalgia...

Back when internet access was rare and Facebook was not a thing yet...

I miss those days. ☺️

[effjay@social.cologne]

@gloriouscow I remember I did that, actually. That page might have looked the same 30 years ago. It was exiting for me because I had to send money internationally, which means I had to find out how to order my bank to do that. that was probably the first and also the last time I had to do that.
Twas pre PayPal 😁

[gloriouscow@oldbytes.space]

@jernej__s before Trumpet Winsock we were all just sitting around on our butts in text mode terminal emulators using Lynx to read gopher sites about trains

[mmu_man@m.g3l.org]

@gloriouscow ROTFL we need to play that on @underscore

[gloriouscow@oldbytes.space]

@vampiress i could see that if they had the 25Mhz version and didn't install any L2 cache. otherwise a 486 should run circles around a 386.

[ra6bit@infosec.exchange]

@gloriouscow Sorry, I went with OS/2 Warp! instead.

[christopherkunz@chaos.social]

@gloriouscow Ohhhh, mIRC! Used the heck out of that until I switched to irssi on a bouncer somewhere. Good times!
I wonder what's going on in IRCNet nowadays...

[gloriouscow@oldbytes.space]

@ra6bit I was only vaguely aware of OS/2 at the time

I just assumed it was Businessy Software

[gloriouscow@oldbytes.space]

@christopherkunz it's about like you remember, netsplits, pointless arguments, and regular flooding attacks from trolls

[christopherkunz@chaos.social]

@gloriouscow Wow, just like I left it. mirkforce still around? Channel takeovers?

[gloriouscow@oldbytes.space]

@christopherkunz the latest thing is just a group called SuperNETS being racist with botnets instead of doing anything clever

[cr1901@mastodon.social]

@gloriouscow For some reason I thought Peter Tattam passed away a few years ago... guess not :o.

Anyways, Trumpet Winsock is weird to me- you start it as a DOS TSR and afterwords it "does the right thing" once you start Win 3.x without Windows destroying its data structures. I wonder how that's managed (if I had infinite time, I'd disassemble it to find out)?