Besides my bad economy in the late 80's and start of 90's, as far I remember it was not so trivial from my country to pay for shareware or most commercial programs back then. If I had to pay for just one thing, probably would had done it with Sidekick.
Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
51–60 of 202 posts
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#52I purchased Kali95 (lost the license)... and one fighting game similar to Mortal Kombat.... forgot the name. Pirated everything else including Windows...
I also had a licence for Kali. It was a great software.
I also paid for KClient, an IRC client with multi-server capabilities before mIRC had it, and you could script it with VBScript IIRC. But that may has been more around 200/2001.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#53Around 2005, I ordered Death Rally. I still have the CD. It came out in 1996, so I think it still counts :D
I came here to say Death Rally as well. I also still have the CD. I remember there was a bug with the copy on the CD where it wouldn’t run if your machine had more than 8MB of ram (or similar). I think we had 48 or 64MB? Either way, I found out 10+ years later that there was a patch that was released to fix the issue.
Edit - their site is still up with the patch: https://legacy.3drealms.com/rally/
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#54From what I can remember - these are from the era of classic Mac OS 7, 8, 9:
Typestyler,
Transmit,
Captain FTP,
WebDesign,
Marathon & its sequels,
Escape Velocity & its sequels.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#55TeleMate - I might still have the original floppies somewhere. I still miss how easy this thing made file transfers; there's simply nothing like it in the modern era.
Commander Keen and Jazz Jackrabbit -- we played the hell out of these and it was only right to register them. Additional levels, whoah!
PKZip 2.04g -- back when software could just be "finished".
mIRC -- I sunk way too many hours of my life into mIRC scripts....
ACDSee 3.x -- Another "there's just nothing like it especially on linux", the fastest JPEG viewer ever to exist. I could crank up my key repeat rate, hold PgDn, and it would blast images into VRAM as fast as the keyboard asked for. Used 4DOS-style Descript.ion files and, to this day, I have a mindboggling amount of photo descriptions trapped in these files. No modern equivalent makes it so easy to tag things right in the filesystem without sucking them into some walled-garden database.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#56Not software but when we got our first computer, it had DigitalBlasphemy wallpapers. 20-something years later, I bought a subscription to relive some of the nostalgia.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#57procomm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datastorm_Technologies
About 1986 or so. Worked perfectly.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#58Small-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 faste…
Power C is still around!
http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm
I remember their ads in the backs of the magazines at the time, but never used the compiler.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#59I picked up Wolfenstein 3D on 5 1/4 floppy from a Dollar Store. Pretty good score for a 10 year old without internet access!
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#60http://www.ThePalace.com in either 1994/95. That website looks like it's straight out of the 90s.
Oh wow, I spent so many hours on this. And Cybertown