Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?

[sgbeal]

Shareware was a common software business model back in the 1980s and 90s, though it's rare (or not called that) nowadays. Even the legendary DOOM was shareware, with the first few missions for free and the later missions available for a nominal fee (a practice not uncommon for games at the time).

In the 90s i used perhaps half a dozen pieces of shareware with any regularity but only purchased three (in no particular order):

1) TheDraw - an ANSI/ASCII art editor, which i briefly used for creating animated screens for use with dial-up BBSes.

2) 4DOS/4NT was a command.com replacement for DOS/Windows which offered features such as the command-line editing available in all modern shells.

3) DOOM, which my two housemates chipped in to help buy. We played the hell out of it, multi-player on two 486/66's connected with a serial cable.

All of the purchases arrived via snail-mail, with TheDraw and DOOM on floppy disks and 4DOS on a CD. A couple weeks after buying it, one of my housemates took the DOOM disk(s?) to his father's place and ended up infecting it with a virus.

What shareware, if any, did you purchase back in the day (and what did you use it for)?

Edit: there was a 4th: WinRCS was a Windows front-end to the RCS version control system. It didn't get much use but it was my introduction to source code control.

[myself248]

TeleMate - 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.

[randombits0]

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.

[jclulow]

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.

[codespin]

Commander Keen was my childhood and then later mIRC scripts were my life. My mind was blown by being able to program something that could interact with real people like mIRC. My love for coding started there.

[TacticalCoder]

As 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 buy Ultima V. But I was not on the C64/C128 anymore, I had an Amiga. So I broke my wallet and bought the Amiga version of Ultima V.

Turns out: the port of Ultima V to the Amiga was particularly bad.

So I borrowed my neighbour's C128D (nice machine: my C128 had a little issue) and... Played a pirated version of Ultima V for the C64 (I'd use the C128 in C64 mode), which was way better than its Amiga port.

Aye.

P.S: semi-seriously though: I remember it was hard to buy US shareware from Europe in the eighties/nineties. My parents didn't even have credit cards back then (it was all still "cheques" and lots of tiny local currencies).

[DarmokJalad1701]

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!

[Clubber]

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.

[Log_out_]

There was a turn based game called pc emperor where my prickly pirate youtfull self actually bought share wäre. Oh and baron baldric..

[bigmattystyles]

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.

[ethbr1]

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.

[EvanAnderson]

Searchlight BBS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searchlight_BBS

A friend actually ran the board but I paid for the software. I coded in Turbo Pascal and enjoyed the file format documentation that came with it and the TPU containing various user interface components that allowed you to write "Door" programs that mimic the BBS UI.

It was also particularly neat that Searchlight supported redirecting BIOS screen writes to remote users, allowing you to use any program that wrote to the screen thru the BIOS as a "Door", with the BBS handling the serial communication.

I had a ton of fun with it in the mid-90s. Then the Internet came along and killed it all off.

[linsomniac]

I 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.

[nathan_douglas]

Not 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 it at a bookstore and installed it. I didn't understand any of what was happening. Everything was hard. I didn't see "power," or "freedom," or anything like that. I just knew that suddenly my computer was a complete pain in the ass to use and I couldn't play games anymore.

I don't really know why I stuck with it, but it led to me fighting with computers for a living, which is fantastic.

[nocoiner]

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 support agent suggested that I maybe check the man pages? At this point, I’m an unreformed Windows user and I’m just trying to set up my system, I have no idea what a man page is! As I recall, I was just trying to get into the GUI - not sure why they couldn’t have just said “startx”.

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. Strike 2, I was out. A few years after that, OS X because semi-usable (10.2?) and I didn’t have much use for Linux for the next decade and a half.

Now I run a couple server-ish boxes on Debian and quite like it - there’s not a whole lot I know how to do, but in those narrow domains that I semi-understand, it works very well for me. But even with as much progress as it has actually made in the last few years, I’m not sure the year of Linux on the desktop is imminent for me any time soon.

[qup]

I did a similar thing, but it was Mandrake. I bought it primarily to save having the multi-gb download over 56k.

I remember doing a lot of fighting with '3dfx' drivers, X, and network drivers. I only had one PC, so I had to run to a friend's house to google [edit: search for things on altavista] things, then I'd bash my head against my keyboard all evening.

I found debian soon after that, and though I've jumped around a little, I run debian still today.

[conradfr]

Maybe you stuck with it because you had paid for it ;)

[strict9]

Legend of the Red Dragon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Red_Dragon

Also WildCat! BBS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat!_BBS

[specialist]

+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.

--

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.

--

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.

[allenu]

I was into BBSes in the early to mid-90s as a teen, but was still pretty cheap, so only purchased a small handful of shareware:

1) Telemate - Probably the best software to call BBSes and download files.

2) Blue Wave (mail reader) - I got hooked on FidoNet, so needed a good mail reader.

3) Legend of the Red Dragon - I ran a BBS too so I absolutely needed this door game. Interestingly enough, reading about how much money the author made got me to write my own BBS door games and I was able to sell a decent number of copies! I really cut my programming teeth on those games I made (in C and C++).

[throw0101d]

> 3) Legend of the Red Dragon - I ran a BBS too so I absolutely needed this door game.

My person favourite was TradeWars 2002:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars

Still seems to be playable online:

* http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php?title=Jumpgate

* http://www.tradewars.com/default.html

[iroddis]

LORD was so much fun. I also ran a BBS, first on Wildcat (RIP graphics were amazing), then on RoboFX. Bought all of the above by saving up $2/week allowance.

RoboFX was insane. It was this little-known host that offered a full windowing system using a client that fit on a single disk. It had movable windows, image viewing, messaging, forums, downloads, the works. Truly incredible for the time, but it was released just at the end of the BBS era. Along with BeOS and WebOS, some of the saddest technologies that never caught on.

Thanks for the memories!

[martin1b]

Liked Telemate also. Pretty sure it had the ability to script a session. You could create a script and set it to dial in when nobody was on the board, download a file and log off, saving precious time on the board, and the busy signal.

Also liked Telix. Was more simple and like Procomm, but Telemate seemed more extensible.

[jrmg]

I 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.

[ralphc]

How do you have access to email from 1997? Migrate the files to newer formats, fired up the original computer?

[flohofwoe]

The DICE C compiler for the Amiga (must have been 1991 or 1992, not sure if it was actually shareware though, but it wasn't a "proper" boxed product either).

I exchanged Deutsche Mark into a hundred-dollar bill, put that into an envelope with backaddress and sent it over to the US. A couple of weeks later I got the reply with a 3.5" floppy disc (or was it two?) and a handwritten letter by Matt Dillon (later of DragonFly BSD fame).

Good times! (and one of the best software investments I ever made)

[Wildgoose]

I remember paying for Opera, twice, back in the early days of the Web when it stood head and shoulders above the competition.

I am still happy to make a contribution for useful software, e.g. WinSCP.

[carlesfe]

VGA 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.

[steamodon]

For me it was a similar game, Stars![0] I got the shareware demo along with several other games on a floppy included with some computer magazine I randomly purchased at the mall. Got my brother and across-the-street neighbor hooked on it and we'd have days-long hot seat games during the summers. Later on I discovered the actual boxed version and bought it on the spot.

It is probably the oldest game I still play occasionally (it runs fine in Wine). In a weird coincidence, in the 201Xs my best friend and I were reminiscing about old games and it turned out he played it in his youth as well, so we fired up our respective copies and got several PBEM (well s/email/Google Drive) games going.

One of my favorite things about it is tweaking scripts to optimize the game economy each time I get another round of obsession with the game. It will dump detailed game data into TSV specifically for parsing by other tools.

If anyone is interested, you can still get legit software keys for it [1].

[0]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars!>

[1]: <https://wiki.starsautohost.org/wiki/Get_Stars!>

[wkat4242]

Yeah I bought this too. It still exists as a web game, by the way. It was fun but it mainly taught me I lack the fundamental strategic insight for such games.

[reactordev]

Doom, Decent, Hexen, Quake, and KidPix. Everything else was purchased full price (Marathon, Photoshop, MS Flight Simulator, Corel Draw, Word Perfect, Compuserve). There was other software but that was mainly it in the late 80s/early 90s. Mac kid until 91 or so. Somewhere around 92 is when we got our first windows machine and I discovered Id Software.

By mid-90s we had IRC and the wonderful Wild West that DCC brought. By late 90s we had P2P services like Napster and LimeWire.

[theshrike79]

Slicks 'n' Slide, still my gold standard for multiplayer 2D racing, Super Cars 2 on Amiga is the only one that came close: https://www.slicksnslide.com

[nprateem]

I loved Super cars 2

[cpach]

FastTracker II. Very cool application. IIRC I used it in DOS (before I had Windows 98). I think it was the first application I ever paid for. Didn’t manage to make any good tunes though, I’m better with physical instruments (:

[lproven]

Then: Matrix, an offline reader for my online service CIX (https://cix.uk/forums/overview)

Now: Carbon Copy Cloner. (https://bombich.com/)

[dantheta]

I couldn’t afford software in the 90s, but I would definitely have registered PowerMenu from Brown Bag software (DOS front end and program launcher). It was really powerful and enjoyable to use, and the interface was delightful. I still think about it often and fired up a DOS emulator pretty recently.

[Cthulhu_]

We used 3DMenu for a long time, it was great, I eventually learned how to add menu entries and had a bit of fun with it too.

[gcp123]

From 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.

[morsch]

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.

[linuxdaemon]

Skyglobe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyglobe

It didn't run speedily on the 286 IBM clone that we had, but it was pretty amazing to me at the time (ca. 1993)

[thanatos519]

Telemate, the amazing terminal program, with its own multitasking (on my IBM PC 5150) text windowing system. It allowed me to write all my school papers while BBSing.

[myself248]

Exactly this. It was almost like having your own little DesQview -- windowed floating text editor, DOS shell, scripting language, and a really full-featured dialer, all on three floppies.

(The fourth was a revolutionary display-a-GIF-while-it-downloads program, which would let you bail on the transfer early if the file wasn't shaping up to be what you wanted, or bail at 98% if you were shady and didn't want to use up the download credit because the board only counted completed transfers. It was barely related to the rest of TeleMate and had to be shelled out to, since it took over the display.)