The ripple effects of software, community, and too many Windows versions.

[Derleth]

This video shows a guy installing MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 1.0 on a virtual machine and upgrading it clear through to Windows 7, representing Microsoft history from 1985 through to the present.

Now, sometimes you can just tell when a video will go viral in a community, and which community it will strike sparks in. This video was a lead-pipe cinch for Reddit’s /r/geek community (thread) and Reddit’s more venture-capital-oriented spinoff, Hacker news.

Another thing you can count on is the tone of the discussion, which, for something like this, will be nostalgic. In the Hacker News discussion, jacques_chester posted this reminiscence:

@jacques_chester

God, the memories. I remember booting up Windows 95 for the first time – I was so stoked. Everything was so new and smooth and perfect.

Plus – and this is the important thing – PPP worked much, much better than 3.1 + trumpet winsock.

Some time around 98SE I was dual booting into BeOS, which was so damn fast it wasn’t funny. But it wasn’t to be.

And I remember browbeating Red Hat 3 into connecting to the internet as well.

The comment about Trumpet Winsock prompted a response:

@nailer

Weirdly enough my uncle actually knew the guy who wrote Trumpet Winsock.

He says he got burnt by piracy fairly badly: computer magazines were including the full version of his app on their cover disks all over the world, ISPs were handing his app to their customers, and his company was too small to stop them.

And we’re off.

This prompted quite a bit of comment, on Reddit and on Hacker News, related to a push to get people to donate to the author as a way to pay him back for all the money he never got for his software when it was in active use.

So what, though? Trumpet Winsock is just communication software: Specifically, it’s a socket implementation on top of a TCP/IP protocol stack implementation, which means it allows programs on operating systems with no native Internet support to access the Internet. Who, when you get down to it, cares about that?

Someone on Hacker News has an answer to that:

@seldo

Donated. As a closeted gay teenager, Trumpet was the software that got me in touch with the people who literally saved my life. I could never thank this guy enough.

(Edit: if you felt like making another worthy donation, the Youth Guard mailing lists are the people I’m referring to – http://www.youth-guard.org/youth/ . I cannot overstate the impact they had on my life.)

So we see the ripples from a trumpet still heard, connecting a novelty video to one of the most vital issues of our time by way of networking software.