(OP here...) Wow, you folks have reminded me of dozens of tools and games i had forgotten were shareware (like pkzip, Telix, mirc, Wolfenstein...).
Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
121–130 of 202 posts
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#122TeleMate - 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, too, contributed to Phil Katz’s ultimate demise from alcohol abuse. Did you get the red, plastic key/coin holder? I call mine my PKZip license.
Me too, though I don't remember getting a key/coin holder with the disk. Strange to think of me indirectly buying peppermint schnapps at that time.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#123mIRC - after pirating it for years I paid for it in the early 00:s, such great example of free-forever shareware with a persistent design goal. Did enjoy learning simple programming in mIRC scripts on a pirated copy in the 90s as a poor kid.
Pretty much the same here. I used mIRC extensively as shareware from 1994 to early the late 90s/early 2000s, then switched to BitchX and later irssi. It wasn't until somewhere around 2010 I purchased a license for all the joy mIRC had allowed me to access. Whenever I do a reinstall of my server and need to temporarily connect to IRC meanwhile I find myself downloading and using mIRC if only for a couple of hours since I use Windows as my desktop o/s.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#124I think I ended up sending over $30K to John Bradley for xv.
A buddy wanted to scan his album cover, so I bought a HP scanner and wrote some CLI software to do it. Then I started thinking about making a Unix GUI for it and kept thinking "I need to do X like xv does, I need to do Y and Z like xv does." So eventually I decided to just build it as an add-on to xv, and made a deal with John Bradley to sell it, giving him his shareware license cut.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#125Mix C Compiler - came with a great C tutorial book
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#126I'd be interested to hear about creative DRM policies that were used. I remember some used a secret hash key that seemed to be easily cracked with cracker apps/software.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#127- Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Decent - Telix and OS/2 terminal software for modems - PKZip and other archivers - Composer 669 -- 8 channel tracker on a 386 using flat protected memory - Megaroids -- Asteroids clone for Atari ST - Kedit -- large-buffer text editor for OS/2 - DeScribe -- word processor for OS/2 Of all the games the Decent series was my addiction, got the flight stick/throttle and just couldn'…
I used to get motion sickness as a kid when playing descent. Great game though.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#128As 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…
There was a turn based game called pc emperor where my prickly pirate youtfull self actually bought share wäre. Oh and baron baldric..
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#129Halloween Harry. Descent. Harpoon (I think there was a shareware version). Escape velocity.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#130Early 2000s, Tinyspell.
Back in the XP days when a spellchecker was not a standard part of an OS, some folks glued a keylogger and spellchecker together to give universal spelling correction.
It would beep when you misspelled something and had a global keystroke to pop up a replacements menu.
It was incredibly-annoying in cmd.exe until they added an option to ignore certain apps, and I still miss it.
Now, I wonder if you could do something similar with a local LLM but just have it beep when you type something you might regret?