Not me, but my uncle bought winzip. I was 14 or so and I made fun of him for buying it. Without skipping a beat, he replied in French, ‘ils doivent manger ces gents la’ - or ‘those people have to eat’. That shut me up and i still think about that moment a lot.
Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
81–90 of 202 posts
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#82From 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.
Marathon was available as shareware? I think it was plain commercial software that came in a box. At least my copy of Marathon 2 did. Incidentally, I replayed it last year: the gameplay is a bit rough for modern tastes, but the story really holds up.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#83I 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 full speed on the Amiga’s AGA system. I mailed cash to Hungary for it, which in 1997 felt pretty exotic - just a few years before that it was behind the Iron Curtain.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#84Legend of the Red Dragon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Red_Dragon Also WildCat! BBS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat!_BBS
+1 Wildcat! Gods, I loved Wildcat!
I also bought all the related sysop stuff. PKZIP, misc dial-up programs (names?), was Eudora shareware?, QEdit, PC-Write, etc.
The offline mail reader Silly Little Mail Reader (SLMR) had discount bulk purchases to help BBS hosts (and themselves). So I'd buy 20 licenses and resell them to my regular callers at full price.
I miss SLMR every single day. Especially its TWIT filter feature.
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I also published a few AutoCAD add-ons as shareware.
As plaintext source code, because obfuscaters were ineffective and made tech supp that much harder (AutoCAD didn't have a plugin/sandbox framework, so add-ons could clobber each other).
So others would plagiarize my stuff. Which I thought was both funny and helpful. Funny, because the knockoffs were always worse, instead of better. Helpful, because free marketing, because knockoff users would eventually need tech supp, find my originals, and end up buying my version. Woot!
Gods, those were the days. I'm sure it sucked IRL and I'm wearing nostalgia-powered rose-tinted hindsight glasses.
FWIW, I feel like patreon style funding is finally getting us back to the shareware culture (esthetic). Meaning customers give you money to encourage continued development, instead of buying licenses to use existing versions.
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Edit. TIL:
Jim Button (RIP) was a pseudonym. What!?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Knopf
And I misremembered. Bob Wallace (RIP) wrote PC-Write, not Jim Button.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Wallace_(computer_scientis...
I'm sorry I never thought or tried to meet either of them. Darn.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#85I used a Windows editor called TextPad for about 20 years. Maybe there are better editors out there, but it's what my boss used at one job, and I got used to it, and it worked fine for my needs. 20 years in, I thought, come on, I mean I work in software, I can easily afford this ($200 or something). So I paid, and felt good about doing so. I don't know why I didn't do it earlier really! But I was absolutely so used t…
I used TextPad for a long time too, it always seemed to work faster, better and simpler than Notepad++ that was the main rival that people would rave about.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#86Alive and Kicking to stop my dial-up ISP from booting me for inactivity during large (600 MB!) downloads. Mostly used it with Gigex, a shareware games service.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#87VGA Planets. Such a great game, advanced to its time!
It was a Civilization-like game, but in space, with lots of pop culture references, complex like Dwarf Fortress, and turn-based. Each turn was uploaded to a BBS or Usenet, and a host put all the players' turns together every few days, then sent the turn files back. So fun.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#88Not me, but my uncle bought winzip. I was 14 or so and I made fun of him for buying it. Without skipping a beat, he replied in French, ‘ils doivent manger ces gents la’ - or ‘those people have to eat’. That shut me up and i still think about that moment a lot.
IMHO, lack of empathy is a principal reason for moral piracy in ones teens.
You rail against "the system" to justify not paying for something...
... but really you just don't have money, want something, and don't want to feel bad about getting it. Cue post-hoc rationalization.
And money is a precious thing in teenage years! And time is not! So 3 hours scouring IRC to save $10 is a valid trade-off.
But I did like that shareware and smaller software companies, put a human face on things. You were giving money to a person (e.g. now example, Raymond Hill), not a corporate entity.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#89TeleMate - 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 sc…
I remember using ACDSee in my Windows desktop era, and for what it's worth I enjoy "feh" on Linux today in a similar vein.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#90As 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…
It was hard in the US as a teenager too. I had to get my parents to write a check and a stamp and mail it when I bought a BBS license.