Llamatron, Revenge of the Mutant Camels and Colourspace by Llamasoft (Jeff Minter) in 1991-2. I still have the Llama poster somewhere.
Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
151–160 of 202 posts
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#152GoldEd (GED) for the Amiga back in... probably 1992 or 93. Although the Amiga already had good text editors (CED to name one), GED had syntax highlighting and I seem to recall also macros and keyword searching in sources and AmigaGuide docs (think HTML years before the WWW). Back then I was learning the AmigaE language (another gem of that time) and GED turned out quite useful when compiling or simply navigating code.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#153pkZip - Phil Katz's archive program. pkzip 2.04g was the bees knees for a very long time. That, plus a stack of floppy disks with labels was my version control system for a decade. Vern Berg(sp?) - LIST.COM - a file viewer, with a hex mode. I ended up writing my own clone, look TurboPower Software - EDWIN - a wonderful text editor, had the ability to record and run macros. I used Borland's SkidKick and Turbo Pascal a…
I had forgotten about list.com! Wow, what a sudden memory.
Looks like it was Vern Buerg: https://github.com/sebras/buerg
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#154I literally mailed cash to, I think, the author of ShapeShifter for the Amiga - a Mac emulator: https://shapeshifter.cebix.net/ …or - memory is hazy - maybe it was more esoteric than that - was there a fast graphics driver for ShapeShifter by a different author? Edit: Checked my old email and, yes, a graphics ‘driver’ called ‘Savage030’ which I think used the 68030’s MMU somehow to make Mac 256 color graphics work fu…
How do you have access to email from 1997? Migrate the files to newer formats, fired up the original computer?
It’s just in my email account. I’ve had the same email address on my own domain since 1996.
Changed providers a few times, but I’ve always migrated the archive over.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#155I'm pretty sure at some point I actually bought a WinRAR and Winzip license.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#156Not Shareware exactly, but once I started earning money in the mid 90s, I purchased physical copies of Slackware on CD-ROM to support the distro that taught me Linux. It was also much more convenient than downloading dozens of floppies from ftp.funet.fi or whatever FTP server I was using at the time. As for my Amiga and C64 days, I was too young to have a lot of money, and piracy was rampant in Europe, where I lived.…
I bought Redhat in the late 90s at a computer flea market in Dallas.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#157I was hoping to be surprised to see WinRAR on many people's list, and as of right now I see exactly zero people purchased WinRAR as I sadly expected. I didn't purchase it either.
I did :-)
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#158I was into BBSes in the early to mid-90s as a teen, but was still pretty cheap, so only purchased a small handful of shareware: 1) Telemate - Probably the best software to call BBSes and download files. 2) Blue Wave (mail reader) - I got hooked on FidoNet, so needed a good mail reader. 3) Legend of the Red Dragon - I ran a BBS too so I absolutely needed this door game. Interestingly enough, reading about how much mon…
LORD was so much fun. I also ran a BBS, first on Wildcat (RIP graphics were amazing), then on RoboFX. Bought all of the above by saving up $2/week allowance.
RoboFX was insane. It was this little-known host that offered a full windowing system using a client that fit on a single disk. It had movable windows, image viewing, messaging, forums, downloads, the works. Truly incredible for the time, but it was released just at the end of the BBS era. Along with BeOS and WebOS, some of the saddest technologies that never caught on.
Thanks for the memories!
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#159I literally mailed cash to, I think, the author of ShapeShifter for the Amiga - a Mac emulator: https://shapeshifter.cebix.net/ …or - memory is hazy - maybe it was more esoteric than that - was there a fast graphics driver for ShapeShifter by a different author? Edit: Checked my old email and, yes, a graphics ‘driver’ called ‘Savage030’ which I think used the 68030’s MMU somehow to make Mac 256 color graphics work fu…
How do you have access to email from 1997? Migrate the files to newer formats, fired up the original computer?
I too still have my emails starting from the 90s. I've always copied them on the provider side when migrating my email to a new account (4 or 5 times now in total).
First mailbox was 5MB, others after that were always generous enough that I could easily just keep all my emails.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#160As teenagers we were pirates sailing the high digital seas, our rooms filled with stashes of 5"1/4 and 3"1/2 floppies. Buying neither shareware (btw as teenagers in Europe we had no idea how we'd even buy sharewares) nor commercial games (these you'd just go to a shop and buy them). However one day, when Ultima V came out, I decided I'd buy it: I had been playing Ultima III and Ultima IV so much, it seemed right to b…
Sharewares got me into coding tbh. As a teenager growing up in India, paying $20+ for a video game was too big of an ask (That was on the order of 1000 rupees at the time and would pay for 20+ meals at a decent restaurant) and there was no way to pay for it even if I wanted to, as my parents did not have credit cards at the time. So I learned to "crack" shareware, first by patching using hex editors and then using de…
Ha ha another student of fravia and +orc?