Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?

Searchlight BBS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searchlight_BBS

A friend actually ran the board but I paid for the software. I coded in Turbo Pascal and enjoyed the file format documentation that came with it and the TPU containing various user interface components that allowed you to write "Door" programs that mimic the BBS UI.

It was also particularly neat that Searchlight supported redirecting BIOS screen writes to remote users, allowing you to use any program that wrote to the screen thru the BIOS as a "Door", with the BBS handling the serial communication.

I had a ton of fun with it in the mid-90s. Then the Internet came along and killed it all off.

One Must Fall from Epic Megagames. Took close to two months to arrive iirc

Small-C for CP/M anno '87 or so. It, er, was a learning experience. Z80 isn't the ideal target for C, but still ...

Turbo Pascal (which I couldn't have bought) was much faster and produced better code.

> Small-C for CP/M anno '87 or so.

"Power C" by Mix Software was another one, targeting PCs, and is the C compiler i cut my teeth on back then. IIRC it cost only 5 USD for the compiler and debugger. i don't recall whether it was shareware, but it was really inexpensive and worked well (and could even run on a floppy-only system). It never gave me any grief.

> Turbo Pascal (which I couldn't have bought) was much faster and produced better code.

TP was excellent, and i had taken "backup copies" of TP4 and TP5 from my high school, but i also could never have afforded my own legitimate copy at the time.

I was like, 19 or so when boxed software ended, around 2013, but before then I don't remember any paid software that didn't come from a physical store on optical media.

I have not actually bought any software besides a few games and an android app or two, in about a decade.

I've paid for SASS, Tile, Netflix, a cheap VPS, and used lots of YouAreTheProductWare, and made a few donations, but FOSS seems to be better than commercial software you can actually buy, all the cool stuff in proprietary seems to be cloud based.