In the late 1990s, a Wingate proxy server for sharing an Internet connection to other students in the dorms.
Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
131–140 of 202 posts
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#132I was a little kid, but I’m pretty sure I managed to beg my parents into buying a couple of the Commander Keen games.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#133As 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 debuggers like SoftICE and Ollydbg to figure out the correct registration code myself. This got me into reading/writing x86 (win32) assembly pretty early and gave me a very intuitive understanding about how programs work. There were also plenty of "crackme" programs to test my skills on.
Thank you, "Santa's Secret Valley". I have a great career today thanks in a small part to you!
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#134I 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?
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#135Not 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…
I don't think the age is as important, a friend of mine was buying games since his early teens - but he also pirated stuff. And i do know a lot of people who are in their 40s and still pirate stuff (in fact just the other day i was talking with a friend of mine who was baffled that i bought my Windows 10 license instead of using a crack) while at the same time they also buy things (same guy also buys most of the game he plays for example and has a "big box" collection from games he bought since the 90s).
I think the "human face" you mention is closer to the truth. Me and (another) friend bought WinRAR some years ago (my friend actually bought WinRAR in the 90s and he also bought FAR Manager before it became open source) and said friend was completely into piracy (especially when he bought WinRAR) - when i asked him about it he said it was to support Eugene Roshal.
This puts a new light to Total Commander being sold via ghisler.com (the author's surname) and the site having a very "non corporate" look (and thinking about it, rarlabs.com has a very similar look :-P).
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#136[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#137[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#138I don't remember my early shareware purchases, but I made some for utilities. I do remember receiving by mail a floppy for his freeware from someone who first sent me anonymous ftp instructions. I don't remember what utility software that floppy contained.
I recently paid for several license keys. My most recent license keys are for AirServer, which is an excellent Apple TV emulator for Windows and Netspot, which is a WiFi heatmapper.
Shareware is alive and well on the App Store.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#139I 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.
Oups, *Klient
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#140I actually bought a WinRAR license