Turnpike was a British-developed email and news client for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

, with an associated program for handling the Internet connection. The software, originally written by Chris Hall and Richard Clayton (who had previously been the co-founders and principal programmers of Locomotive Software), first appeared in 1995. It was acquired by

Demon Internet Demon Internet was a British Internet service provider, initially an independent business, later operating as a brand of Vodafone. It was one of the UK's earliest ISPs, offering dial-up Internet access services from 1 June 1992. According to th ...

later the same year and for a number of years was supplied to their customers free of charge (in a variant which would not work with other

ISP An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...

s). In 1998, Demon Internet had over 180,000 subscribers. It is not known how many of these subscribers used Turnpike, but it must have been a substantial number. It also had a small following of non-Demon users. Amongst its early reviews were those in the magazines ''Everyday Practical Electronics'' in November, 1995 and ''

PC Format ''PC Format'' was a computer magazine published in the United Kingdom by Future plc, and licensed to other publishers in countries around the world. In publication between 1991 and 2015, it was part of Future plc's ''Format'' series of magazines ...

'' in Spring 1997. ''The Easy Net'' book by Keith Teare, published at the end of 1995, contained a brief review of version 1.03 of Turnpike, which had been released in July of that year. The suite consisted of two principal components, Connect, which interfaced with the modem driver or LAN, and Turnpike, which controlled, sorted and displayed news articles and email. The Connect window also provided

telnet Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control i ...

finger A finger is a limb of the body and a type of digit, an organ of manipulation and sensation found in the hands of most of the Tetrapods, so also with humans and other primates. Most land vertebrates have five fingers ( Pentadactyly). Chamber ...

, ping, and traceroute functions, call cost monitoring for dialup connections, and, in earlier versions and those upgraded therefrom, Ipswitch's

WS_FTP WinSock File Transfer Protocol, or WS_FTP, is a secure file transfer software package produced by Ipswitch, Inc. Ipswitch is a Massachusetts-based software producer established in 1991 that focuses on networking and file sharing. WS_FTP consists ...

; it had up to 20 buttons which linked to these functions and any other application the user chose to configure (by default including

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Windows line of operating systems (in ...

). Prior to version 6 the Turnpike component was a stand-alone executable whilst from version 6 onwards it was implemented as a

Windows Shell namespace In Windows Shell programming, the Windows Shell namespace is an organized tree-structured hierarchical representation that Windows Explorer facilitates to graphically present file system contents and other objects to the end user. Conceptually, ...

extension. Mail filtering was done using Unix-like

regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...

s. It used the Berkeley mailbox format for the export and import of email files. Versions 4 and beyond were 32-bit, and early versions of 5 included

PGP PGP or Pgp may refer to: Science and technology * P-glycoprotein, a type of protein * Pelvic girdle pain, a pregnancy discomfort * Personal Genome Project, to sequence genomes and medical records * Pretty Good Privacy, a computer program for the ...

. It works with Windows up to (as of 2016) Windows version 10, with the caveat that Turnpike ''version 6'' (due to the shell namespace usage) only works with the 32-bit, not the 64-bit, variants of Windows 7 onwards (it works satisfactorily in virtual machines running 32-bit Windows hosted on machines running the 64-bit versions). Although no

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

port was produced, all versions worked satisfactorily under packages such as the proprietary

Win4Lin Win4Lin is a discontinued proprietary software application for Linux which allowed users to run a copy of Windows 9x, Windows 2000 or Windows XP applications on their Linux desktop. Win4Lin was based on Merge software, a product which changed owne ...

. Versions up to and including 5 also worked quite well under

Wine Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from Fermentation in winemaking, fermented grapes. Yeast in winemaking, Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different ...

. Versions 5 and 6 received the Good Netkeeping Seal of Approval in 2011. Although Turnpike is no longer supported by its manufacturers (who have themselves been the subject of assorted takeovers, mergers, etcetera), there is still (2017) a reasonably active

usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it wa ...

newsgroup A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are discussion groups and are not devoted to publishing news. Newsgroups are technically disti ...

- demon.ip.support.turnpike, populated by knowledgeable users of the software. s its name implies, the newsgroup was originally specific to Demon, but - like the microsoft.public.* hierarchy of newsgroups - it is now carried by many of the remaining news servers. The British

Science Museum Group The Science Museum Group (SMG) consists of five British museums: * The Science Museum in South Kensington, London * The Science and Industry Museum in Manchester * The National Railway Museum in York * The Locomotion Museum (formerly the Nat ...

has among its collection a copy of an early version of the software in its original packaging."Science Museum Group. Turnpike internet software in original packaging.. 2008-5069/9."
Retrieved 9 October, 2017

References

External links

(2001) * ews:demon.ip.support.turnpike Demon.ip.support.turnpike newsgroup {{network-software-stub Usenet clients Email clients Discontinued internet suites