A CompuServe client whose name I forget.
(It might have been 'Oz'-something.)
Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
191–200 of 202 posts
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Tcmd is excellent, and his dedication to it is too.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#193Raptor - Call of the shadows
Damn, I scrolled this entire thread trying to think of the name of this game. Nice.
I bought it at a Circuit City. RIP!
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#194SinkSub Pro!
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#195PC-Write. Bought the sources, too. PKZIP. Was pretty much required. Quarterdesk Desqview. Used it for 6 months, then switched to Linux. And of course, DOOM .. Wolfenstein .. Spectre VR ..
> PKZIP. Was pretty much required. Do you recall what the benefit of registering pkzip was? i used it a lot but never bought it (and don't recall using a cracked copy).
It kept Phil in booze money.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#196Not exactly the same, but something that got me a couple weird looks at the time was paying almost $100 for RedHat Linux (6.1, Cartman) in 1999. I'd wanted to use Linux for a couple years (I thought it looked hacker-ish and had watched _The Matrix_ in theaters not long before that). But my PC didn't have a CD writer. My 4.3GB HD didn't have enough free space to download the ISOs. And I didn't have internet access. So…
I bought Red Hat at the same time, for around the same price, probably the same release, though I don’t recall which one it was specifically. I bought it because I wanted to start learning a Unix-like OS (OSS was not a driving principle for me in those days, though I have always respected and appreciated the movement) and, most crucially for me, I wanted paid support. The first time I called with a question, the supp…
>Second time I called with a question (by this point, I had learned enough to know to ask the question “how do I create a non-root user account?”), they suggested I hop onto their IRC channel and ask the community. I logged on to IRC and … promptly got booted for being logged into my local system as root.
I laughed _hard_ at this. Classic Linux community response.
I struggled a lot too. After RedHat I tried Gentoo, and they had a forum where I got in a lot of arguments, got banned a few times, got other people angry enough that they got themselves banned, etc. But I think its bottom-up approach and the absolute lack of filter on the part of some of the users was good, in a weird way.
I did start using a Mac at, I think, 10.3, and I've stuck with that for desktop use. So yeah, completely with you about the desktop vs. server experience. A couple years back I tried a couple distros out on a work x64 laptop, and still didn't care for the experience.
"How do I get my touchpad to work how I want?" I beseeched the internet, for seemingly hours on end. Far away in the distance, a wolf howled.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#197Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#1982010s era, but Easy HDTV (http://www.enigmaindustries.com/easyhdtv/) was the one that actually cracked my wallet.
For some reason, TV tuner cards always came with garish, clunky software. This is minimal, reasonably native, and simply did the job well.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought Red Hat at the same time, for around the same price, probably the same release, though I don’t recall which one it was specifically. I bought it because I wanted to start learning a Unix-like OS (OSS was not a driving principle for me in those days, though I have always respected and appreciated the movement) and, most crucially for me, I wanted paid support. The first time I called with a question, the supp…
>Second time I called with a question (by this point, I had learned enough to know to ask the question “how do I create a non-root user account?”), they suggested I hop onto their IRC channel and ask the community. I logged on to IRC and … promptly got booted for being logged into my local system as root. I laughed _hard_ at this. Classic Linux community response. I struggled a lot too. After RedHat I tried Gentoo, a…
The must frustrating experience I’ve had in the last six months was trying to get non-free wireless drivers to function in Debian. It wasn’t even a crazy chipset, it was just one of the non-exalted ones.
Head meet desk, repeatedly.
Re: Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
#200PC-Write. Bought the sources, too. PKZIP. Was pretty much required. Quarterdesk Desqview. Used it for 6 months, then switched to Linux. And of course, DOOM .. Wolfenstein .. Spectre VR ..
> PKZIP. Was pretty much required. Do you recall what the benefit of registering pkzip was? i used it a lot but never bought it (and don't recall using a cracked copy).
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