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Battle of the Networks 29
compatibility into its PC operating system. PCs could dial in to a single computer
like that of CompuServe or AOL and communicate with it, but the ability
to run Internet-aware applications on the PC itself was limited. To attach to
the Internet, one would need a minicomputer or workstation of the sort typically
found within university computer science departments—and usually
used with direct network connections rather than modems and phone lines.
A single hobbyist took advantage of PC generativity and forged the missing
technological link. Peter Tattam, an employee in the psychology department of
the University of Tasmania, wrote Trumpet Winsock, a program that allowed
owners of PCs running Microsoft Windows to forge a point-to-point Internet
connection with the dial-up servers run by nascent Internet Service Providers
(ISPs). 38 With no formal marketing or packaging, Tattam distributed Winsock
as shareware. He asked people to try out the program for free and to send him
$25 if they kept using it beyond a certain tryout period. 39
Winsock was a runaway success, and in the mid-1990s it was the primary
way that Windows users could access the Internet. Even before there was wide
public access to an Internet through which to distribute his software, he
claimed hundreds of thousands of registrations for it, 40 and many more people
were no doubt using it and declining to register. Consumer accessibility to Internet-enabled
applications, coupled with the development of graphic-friendly
World Wide Web protocols and the PC browsers to support them—both initially
noncommercial ventures—marked the beginning of the end of proprietary
information services and jerry-rigged systems like FIDOnet. Consumers
began to explore the Internet, and those who wanted to reach this group, such
as commercial merchants and advertising-driven content providers, found it
easier to set up outposts there than through the negotiated gates of the proprietary
services.
Microsoft bundled the functionality of Winsock with late versions of Windows
95. 41 After that, anyone buying a PC could hook up to the Internet instead
of only to AOL’s or CompuServe’s walled gardens. Proprietary information
services scrambled to reorient their business models away from corralled
content and to ones of accessibility to the wider Internet. 42 Network providers
offering a bundle of content along with access increasingly registered their appeal
simply as ISPs. They became mere on-ramps to the Internet, with their
users branching out to quickly thriving Internet destinations that had no relationship
to the ISP for their programs and services. 43 For example, CompuServe’s
“Electronic Mall,” an e-commerce service intended as the exclusive