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Comment by alias_neo | Hacker News Reader

I remember PortableApps.com fondly from my childhood, I spent days building and customising USB sticks with auto-launching menus and all of the tools and utilities I could ever need. Getting a bigger USB stick was always fun as I could put more stuff on there.

I used to enjoy just browsing the app list to find out about new software I'd never heard of.

Having not run Windows for most of my adult life, I haven't used it or even remembered it exists for a long time, I'm glad to see it's still doing well.

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Similar story here.

I also feel as though PortableApps was the catalyst that pushed me to look into open source software, and Linux.

I enjoyed that too. Mac user at home, but school only had Windows 2000 PCs with IE5, Office and not much else. Meanwhile I carried around my USB drive with Firefox (tabs and bookmarks!!) and Open Office so I could then edit the same docs on my Mac at home. I was always in fear of one day the IT dept figuring out how to block it.

Glad it helped you out in your youth. You can still play around with it under Wine if you're a Linux user. And I'm prepping a Mac package with a Wine variant.

Thanks John. I'll try run it in wine if I get a free minute. I have children of my own now though so those are rare!

I know round about the time I stopped using windows, auto-run was more challenging, had this had much/any effect on PortableApps?

I created a simple tool folks could run locally to auto-run their PA.c drive on their PC. But you could just set Windows to open Explorer to the drive contents automatically and then double-click Start.exe, so it wasn't a huge inconvenience. And soon after we started working with cloud drives, too. And local. So it gradually became less relevant anyway. I even ditched the old autorun.inf files since some folks didn't know how to rename their drives after.

I still remember downloading them onto a 3.5" floppy then onto a 100MB Zip for use on Windows 95.

Fond memories of tinyapps.org and analogx.com back in those days.

I never touched ZIP drives, went straight from floppies to USB sticks and CDs, I think I remember first using floppies to "upgrade" my Olivetti PC from DOS to Windows 3.1, was several diskettes, mid to late 90s perhaps? I was single-digit years old at the time.

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