The Windows Sockets API specification defines two interfaces: the API used by application developers, and the SPI, which provides a means for network software developers to add new protocol modules to the system. Users would commonly believe that only making sure the DLL file was present on a system would provide full TCP/IP protocol support. In the end, it was decided that the specification would simply be copyrighted by the five authors as (unaffiliated) individuals.Īll the participating developers resisted the shortening of the name to simple Winsock for a long time, since there was much confusion among users between the API and the DLL library file (winsock.dll) which only exposed the common WSA interfaces to applications above it. There was some discussion about how best to address the copyright, intellectual property, and potential anti-trust issues, and consideration was given to working through the IETF or establishing a non-profit foundation. The first edition of the specification was authored by Martin Hall, Mark Towfiq of Microdyne (later Sun Microsystems), Geoff Arnold of Sun Microsystems, and Henry Sanders and J Allard of Microsoft, with assistance from many others. At the time the NetManage socket was the only 100% DLL based, multi-threaded product for Windows 3.0 available. It is based on socket specifications created by NetManage and which it put into public domain at this meeting. The Windows Sockets project had its origins in a Birds Of A Feather session held at Interop '91 in San Jose on October 10, 1991. Add to this the fact that end users were wary of getting locked into a single vendor and it became clear that some standardization was needed. Without a single standard programming model, it was difficult to persuade independent software developers to create networking applications which would work with any vendor's underlying TCP/IP implementation. The drawback faced by all of these vendors was that each of them used their own API (Application Programming Interface). When Windows 2.0 was released, these vendors were joined by others such as Distinct and NetManage in offering TCP/IP for Windows.

A number of university groups and commercial vendors, including the PC/IP group at MIT, FTP Software, Sun Microsystems, Ungermann-Bass, and Excelan, introduced TCP/IP products for MS-DOS, often as part of a hardware/software bundle.

In particular, Microsoft did not offer support for the TCP/IP protocol stack at that time. Early Microsoft operating systems, both MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows, offered limited networking capability, chiefly based on NetBIOS.

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