Thanks for Trumpet Winsock
Oh man, the memories.<p>For people who have grown up in a hyper-connected always-online world, it's hard to explain the pure <i>joy</i> 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.<p>Suddenly, everything was at your fingertips and it was intoxicating to me as a teenager. Fire up Trumpet Winsock and dial into the local mom and pop ISP. Suddenly you're surfing the early web using Netscape. Or open up WinVN and read some newsgroups. Or spend way, way too many hours playing MUDs (seriously, I think I spent almost every night MUDding during my teenage years).<p>Or learning cool HTML tricks by looking at the source of a page (back when pages were simple and you could tell things by looking at the source). Some of my earliest exposure to "programming" was because I wanted to make cool web things on my 1mb of ISP provided web space.<p>So yes, thank you Trumpet Winsock. Without you my formative years would have been very different and I likely wouldn't be in the career I'm in now.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured...</a>