Tales from the archive

2000: the free-host days

The first CableNut was two things. One was the Cablenut Speedup Program for Windows 95/98/ME, a small installer (v2.05, later updated to 2.5 and 2.52) whose cablenut.exe had a manual tweak screen. The other was a hand-written cablenut2k.reg patch for Windows 2000 that you installed by right-clicking and choosing Merge. Rick called the Windows 2000 patch a beta.

It lived on cablenut.performance.cx under the title “CableNut’s Tweak Land – More Cable Then @Home!”, built as a frameset. Every page ended with the same note: best viewed at 800×600 or higher.

On January 16, 2001 Rick posted that the performance.cx network would go dark on January 31 after its bandwidth providers cut the host off. Teammate JonG had already offered space on his university student account, and the site was moved before the deadline. Rick’s verdict at the time: faster anyway.

The benchmark

This chart ran on the CableNut 3.5 page in January 2001. Rick’s Windows 2000 test ran twice with default settings and twice with CableNut 3.5. The defaults averaged about 317,000 bytes/s (290,344 and 343,540). With CableNut 3.5 the average rose to about 447,000 bytes/s (429,425 and 464,551), about 41% faster on that 2001 connection. By spring 2001 the CableNut 4.0 software page made a more modest promise: improve your internet speed up to 30%. These were 2001 results; modern Windows tunes itself.

In the press

By far, the best ISP optimizer I’ve ever found is Cablenut.

The Screen Savers, TechTV: “Top Tweakers: Cablenut”

Softpedia’s “100% Clean” certification (2006) and the KMCS “Really Cool Software” award.

Life on the forums

CableNut grew up on the broadband boards, SpeedGuide.net most of all. A few things that came up again and again (paraphrased, from threads between 2001 and 2005):

The Broadbandnuts and DSLnuts years

In spring 2001 CableNut merged into Broadbandnuts.com, a shared home for CableNut and a DSL help site. For the next twenty years the software, the guides and the forums lived under the broadbandnuts.com and dslnuts.com names.

• May 2001: Dannjr registers broadbandnuts.com, “home to Cablenut and DSLnuts”, with forums for help, tweaking, networking and security.
• November 2001: new forums break, the backups turn out to be almost empty, and the site goes back to its old boards for a while. The same update announces the CableNut MTU Tool beta.
• February 2002: the site names cablenut.com as the official CableNut address.
• August 2009: the forums hold about 29,600 posts.
• January 2021: the last archived snapshots show about 30,300 posts. The old site and forums closed around the end of 2021, and CableNut moved to WordPress (see the 2022 post).

The team

The CableNut team, as credited in the 3.5 release notes (January 2001) and later pages:

• Rick (“Cablenut”): webmaster, the tweaks themselves, and NSIS installer scripting
• Dannjr: DSL tweaks; he also ran his own cable and DSL patches site, and later proofread Rick’s articles
• JonG: the team’s self-described uber-geek, who wrote the CableNut Adjuster and hosted the site on his student web space

With special thanks to SpeedGuide.net, TweakFiles.com, Nullsoft and a SpeedGuide forum regular.

“We’re alive and tweaking”

By 2006 the team posted a thank-you to the fans who had kept CableNut going “since the first conception in 2000”. Future updates were unlikely, they wrote, but the site and forums would stay up for their supporters. The old forums closed around the end of 2021, but twenty years later the site is still here.