Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase? | Hacker News Reader

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

106 pointssgbeal195 comments

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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!

Ha ha another student of fravia and +orc?

Haha! I had completely forgotten about that site. I have definitely used those tutorials!

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.

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.

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).

Tcmd is excellent, and his dedication to it is too.

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.

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.

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.

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

Oh, if _only_ I stuck with, say, 1% of the hobbies that I paid a non-trivial amount of money to start...

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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

+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.

Procomm plus!

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++).

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!

> 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

I remember TradeWars 2002. I was never into strategy games all that much, but did play a bit of Global War and later Falcon's Eye.

I was surprised to find that several BBS door games are still available for sale, such as Barren Realms Elite:

* https://www.johndaileysoftware.com/products/bbsdoors

Apparently, the above company acquired several BBS door game IPs and continues to make them available today for purchase!

I also stumbled upon one of my own games on archive.org, available to play in the browser (albeit single user only):

* https://archive.org/details/msdos_Enigma_of_Ashrella_The_199...

In my case, I still occasionally have people emailing me for registration codes, but I point them to free codes I published years ago.

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.

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.

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

It’s just in my email account. I’ve had the same email address on my own domain since 1996.

Changed providers a few times, but I’ve always migrated the archive over.

I too still have my emails starting from the 90s. I've always copied them on the provider side when migrating my email to a new account (4 or 5 times now in total).

First mailbox was 5MB, others after that were always generous enough that I could easily just keep all my emails.

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)

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.

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.

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!>

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.

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.

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

I loved Super cars 2

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 (:

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kye_(video_game) It was charityware and me and a friend pooled our pocket money to pay the 20 pounds when we were 10.

But, I pirated the vast majority of shareware I used as a teen (at least the ones with time limits or other limitations). Ironic considering that I released later a shareware myself.

Man, I never completed the main set of that game. Something around level 15 just seemed impossible to me :D

PC-Write, which had nice macro keybindings for programming. Ctrl-I tab tab to insert an entire if-then-else with comment lines at the appropriate indentation level. Cat-themed user manual. :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-Write

Catalogs from Public Brand Software and the Boston Computer Society.

> PC-Write, which had nice macro keybindings for programming.

i used qedit for that, but it was an admittedly cracked copy of the full version. (Noting that the statute of limitations for that crime has long-since passed!)

PC-Write was the best! I bought it in person at one of the West Coast PC Faires and met the primary programmer (forget his name right now).

Small-C for CP/M anno '87 or so. It, er, was a learning experience. Z80 isn't the ideal target for C, but still ...

Turbo Pascal (which I couldn't have bought) was much faster and produced better code.

> Small-C for CP/M anno '87 or so.

"Power C" by Mix Software was another one, targeting PCs, and is the C compiler i cut my teeth on back then. IIRC it cost only 5 USD for the compiler and debugger. i don't recall whether it was shareware, but it was really inexpensive and worked well (and could even run on a floppy-only system). It never gave me any grief.

> Turbo Pascal (which I couldn't have bought) was much faster and produced better code.

TP was excellent, and i had taken "backup copies" of TP4 and TP5 from my high school, but i also could never have afforded my own legitimate copy at the time.

Power C is still around!

http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm

I remember their ads in the backs of the magazines at the time, but never used the compiler.

Escape Velocity. Take that Cap’n Hector!

Best game ever. Nothing really has scratched the itch since but endless sky was close

Glad to see this mentioned (twice even!). Ambrosia Software! This was the first game I was really exposed to "mods" and user created content with, too. Takes me back!

EV: Nova was the first shareware game I ever paid for. Also how I learned to use ResEdit. The Ship Variants mod was the best! There was nothing quite so overpowered as a Type IV Modified Valkyrie, a ship that was basically impossible to capture in stock without a massively larger ship or small fleet. It had most of the cargo capacity of a stock (Type I) Mod. Valkyrie, but about 3-4x the weapons mass, filled with missile launches and an ion beam (unheard of on a 2-day jump ship), and with room to spare for a medium laser.

pkZip - Phil Katz's archive program. pkzip 2.04g was the bees knees for a very long time. That, plus a stack of floppy disks with labels was my version control system for a decade.

Vern Berg(sp?) - LIST.COM - a file viewer, with a hex mode. I ended up writing my own clone, look

TurboPower Software - EDWIN - a wonderful text editor, had the ability to record and run macros.

I used Borland's SkidKick and Turbo Pascal all the time.

I don't remember the name of the image viewing program we all used.

ACDSee?

I had forgotten about list.com! Wow, what a sudden memory.

Looks like it was Vern Buerg: https://github.com/sebras/buerg

Jacaranda Jim! What an awesome text adventure. Written by Graham Cluley who went on to do awesome things.

I still have the receipts from when my dad bought GraphicConverter (with a carbon-paper credit card receipt in DM) and ZTerm for Mac back in the mid-90s.

GraphicConverter is still actively maintained today (although that license isn’t still good), and ZTerm lasted (with no changes) to the Intel era.

One Must Fall from Epic Megagames. Took close to two months to arrive iirc

> One Must Fall from Epic Megagames

Thank you - Epic Megagames was a name i was trying to recall while writing this post. Their Jill of the Jungle and ZZT are shareware titles i remember (but never bought).

Interesting how far they've come, though they're just called Epic now.

I hope they bring back the MegaGames brand and start producing retro DOS games again, that would be cool.

ZZT was great, it was my first programming experience and the earliest user created content / programming game I can think of; it was always a joy to find a collection of ZZT maps on these disks you'd get with computer magazines.

They were onto something as well, given the success of Fortnite which also has user created levels.

Loved OMF, I played the shareware version so many times. Eventually got a copy of the full version (since it was still a diskette game iirc so easily copied), I did play all of it but it didn't have the feeling of the shareware version, weirdly enough. Kids interact with things differently.

There was a sequel at one point, a 3D, 3rd person arena melee variant, but it just didn't work imo. A shame, it was a great franchise.

> I did play all of it but it didn't have the feeling of the shareware version, weirdly enough. Kids interact with things differently.

my parents got me those kiosk cds filled with shareware and demos back in the day, also had way more fun pushing the bounds of each small demo than investing in a full story

I loved that game! I was probably 4 years old playing that. My dad had to start it up for me. I think he still has a tape of me crying about it being too difficult. Great times.

I never did work out how to do the special attack...

I 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

https://www.downloadsource.net/1432/klient/

Descent and warcraft 2 on Kali. Good times.

I still miss Descent...

When I got a rea job, I registered Winrar. Felt good, and I still use it.

Same here! That was one of my first shareware purchases and, honestly, the only one I can remember.

There were plenty of other apps I used that had shareware versions (including Doom), but my path into the software rarely started with the shareware. I usually just bought the full package at a store back then.

Sidekick - the first TSR (Terminal Stay Ready) app I can remember on DOS. I was a kid and didn't really need a PIM, but it was really cool and I think I convinced my dad to buy it.

Not Shareware exactly, but once I started earning money in the mid 90s, I purchased physical copies of Slackware on CD-ROM to support the distro that taught me Linux. It was also much more convenient than downloading dozens of floppies from ftp.funet.fi or whatever FTP server I was using at the time. As for my Amiga and C64 days, I was too young to have a lot of money, and piracy was rampant in Europe, where I lived. Even if I had wanted to pay I wouldn't have known how to send money overseas.

I bought Redhat in the late 90s at a computer flea market in Dallas.

I 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.

I was hoping to be surprised to see WinRAR on many people's list, and as of right now I see exactly zero people purchased WinRAR as I sadly expected.

I didn't purchase it either.

In the 90s?

Huh, it came out in 1995. I don't think I ever saw it until a couple years into the 2000s. I think I did buy it.

In the mid-00s I was trying to get an mp3 file off an old PC with Windows 95 and no USB support (no ethernet either, only a 28.8k modem). After thinking about it for a long while, WinRAR was my solution. I was surprised it supported Windows 95, as I didn't remember hearing about it back then either. I was able to use WinRAR to split the file up across multiple floppy disks, moved all those parts to a more modern computer, and joined them back together. I'm glad there wasn't much more on there to move. I suppose if there was I would have removed the drive completely and mounted it on another system.

I did :-)

Winrar was one of the first pieces of software I paid for as soon as I got my first paycheck!

> "Nobody registers WinRAR." So let's register WinRAR! It's notorious for its infinite 40-day trial so I've been curious what activating it is actually like. I also wonder how old of a version of WinRAR can be activated using a 2021 registration key! Let's find out with Windows XP, 98, 95...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7W6hv4kcvg

I used a Windows editor called TextPad for about 20 years. Maybe there are better editors out there, but it's what my boss used at one job, and I got used to it, and it worked fine for my needs.

20 years in, I thought, come on, I mean I work in software, I can easily afford this ($200 or something). So I paid, and felt good about doing so. I don't know why I didn't do it earlier really!

But I was absolutely so used to the 20 years of multiple-times-per-day muscle memory of clicking away the nag panel on startup telling you to pay. So I uninstalled the program and reinstalled it without typing in the registration code, even though I'd paid, so I could get back to the "workflow" that I was used to...

I was a very long time user of TextPad as well. I just had to go look it up and am pleasantly surprised it's still being updated. Though, the copyright on their website still says 2020.

That’s absolutely hilarious.

I liked Textpad as well, and - besides other things - used it to write ANSYS files.

When I got Internet access at work, I downloaded the ANSYS syntax file from the Textpad website and to my surprise they were written by my boss at the time. syntax

This made me think that the Internet must be a small world too, and for some time it maybe really was. Good times!

EDIT: I checked it out and for sure... drumroll! The file is still there:

ANSYS APDL Contributed by Randolf Mock and Markus Michel

https://www.textpad.com/addons/syntax

I used TextPad for a long time too, it always seemed to work faster, better and simpler than Notepad++ that was the main rival that people would rave about.

GoldEd (GED) for the Amiga back in... probably 1992 or 93. Although the Amiga already had good text editors (CED to name one), GED had syntax highlighting and I seem to recall also macros and keyword searching in sources and AmigaGuide docs (think HTML years before the WWW). Back then I was learning the AmigaE language (another gem of that time) and GED turned out quite useful when compiling or simply navigating code.

Bunch of games, mainly from the big names (Apogee and Epic). Only "indie" game I can think of right now is Megazeux, though there might have been others.

Oh, there was one from a local guy that I'm not sure ever spread beyond our local BBSs, and I've never seen a reference to it on the Internet. I keep meaning to upload it to archive.org at some point since I may be the only one in the world who has it.

mIRC, a windows .HLP authoring tool, an animated GIF HTML button generator, a graphics DLL for Windows. I think I might've licensed a QWK Mail reader for BBS use as well.

I also sold a few shareware apps in the late 90's and early 2000's. Mostly command-line email and/or command-line something-or-other utilities.

Nothing. I think that the only program I ever bought was some incremental backup software for Windows XP for my laptop at home but that was some years later, in the 2000s. For everything else, free or open source solutions were good enough for me even when I still used Windows.

By the way, I'm using rsnapshot for my backups now.

I purchased a license for the shareware XV, for gif/png/tiff/jpg etc, by John Bradley. Over the years I've added a few patches. I still use it more than any other tool for looking at my photos.

I also paid for Mup (for writing music scores) back when it was still shareware. I'm using it all the time still.

I'm pretty sure I bought golded from Odinn Sorensen (yes 2 n's lol). And frontdoor. Not entirely sure though.

I pirated a lot back then because it was often simply impossible to pay for US based software from Holland. I was too young for a credit card and those hardly existed in Holland anyway in those days.

I bought Doom and Quake (and several map packs) of course. But my real treasure trove was a deal on a bunch of early id Software produced Softdisk distributed games. It included some FPS games that are almost entirely unknown these days and pre-date Doom and some relatively unknown Commander Keen stuff.

I only recall ever purchasing one piece of shareware: TaskMaker [1]. It was a relatively simple game, but I recall the betrayal at the end blew my 12-year-old mind...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TaskMaker

I used sled.com — Sam’s Little Editor - for years while a university student - and years later tracked down the author to pay him.

Bought every single boxed product that Borland put out: TurboC, TurboDebugger, TurboAssembly, TurboPascal, TurboC++

Bought 3 versions of OS/2 — back when I thought it might win over Windows. Oops

Around 2005, I ordered Death Rally. I still have the CD. It came out in 1996, so I think it still counts :D

I came here to say Death Rally as well. I also still have the CD. I remember there was a bug with the copy on the CD where it wouldn’t run if your machine had more than 8MB of ram (or similar). I think we had 48 or 64MB? Either way, I found out 10+ years later that there was a patch that was released to fix the issue.

Edit - their site is still up with the patch: https://legacy.3drealms.com/rally/

Pharaoh’s Tomb

Commander Keen

Think I got the shareware versions from The Software Labs catalog or maybe another one. Of course the original Castle Wolfenstein. I ordered a lot of shareware games and it was like playing the lottery in terms of finding something good, but CW was a mind-blowing change.

Besides my bad economy in the late 80's and start of 90's, as far I remember it was not so trivial from my country to pay for shareware or most commercial programs back then. If I had to pay for just one thing, probably would had done it with Sidekick.

Halloween Harry. Descent. Harpoon (I think there was a shareware version). Escape velocity.

  - 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't get enough of being almost lost in 6-DoF trying to stay alive! This might have been a shrink-wrap game though, can't recall.

I used to get motion sickness as a kid when playing descent. Great game though.

I still have my 3.5" PKZip floppy with the personalized license, and a copy of Procomm Plus (with the nice manual) somewhere. I was using CP/M for most of the 80's and switched to Linux in the early 90's, so aside from commercial software purchases (like Borland C, DesqView/X, some games, and Linux OSF Motif), there wasn't much else. I did purchase a Yggdrasil Linux (live) CD too, but I'm not sure if that counts. I also signed up for 386BSD (via FAX), but Linux arrived first so I never did much BSD. I had a subscription to the Slackware Linux CDs too.

To learn unix: FreeBSD on CDs from FreeBSD.org in circa 1994/1995.

To learn more C: The Walnut Creek C Users Group CD, circa 1994/1995 - still available at - https://archive.org/details/cug995

To improve my wallpaper: Pre-Raphaelite Art on CD - still available at https://www.mindworkshop.com/indcdrom.html

Raptor - 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!

I think my brother-in-law gave me a free copy of Doom in '93. It turned my gaming world upside-down, and I sent off for the full version and did it again when Doom 2 came out. I was also an early customer for Ultraedit, which I used on personal projects (and at work, against policy) for at least 10 years. Late in the '90s I paid for the QVCS version control system, and later, Enterprise QVCS, which was a multi-user client-server system that I used for personal and consulting projects. Good stuff.

BTW -- this book is a wonderful look at the shareware games of the era: https://sharewareheroes.com/

I was like, 19 or so when boxed software ended, around 2013, but before then I don't remember any paid software that didn't come from a physical store on optical media.

I have not actually bought any software besides a few games and an android app or two, in about a decade.

I've paid for SASS, Tile, Netflix, a cheap VPS, and used lots of YouAreTheProductWare, and made a few donations, but FOSS seems to be better than commercial software you can actually buy, all the cool stuff in proprietary seems to be cloud based.

procomm

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

About 1986 or so. Worked perfectly.

Had cool sounds too.

I'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.

http://www.ThePalace.com in either 1994/95. That website looks like it's straight out of the 90s.

I bet the owner of that domain could earn a good payout by selling it.

Oh wow, I spent so many hours on this. And Cybertown

I'd be interested to hear about creative DRM policies were used. I remember some used a secret hash key that seemed to be easily cracked with cracker apps/software.

ARJ, maybe a Zip program, misc. BBS software, and IIRC, I sent in a payment for ZModem or some terminal program that used ZModem, but that got returned to me unopened.

OMG, completely forgot about ARJ!

Alive and Kicking to stop my dial-up ISP from booting me for inactivity during large (600 MB!) downloads. Mostly used it with Gigex, a shareware games service.

Doom - duh! Wacky Wheels, (top down hotseat racing game!) actual software however... never.

I vaguely remember buying the DOS SimCity. You could play it without a license key, but disasters like tornados and fires would start appearing everywhere.

2010s 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.

TheBat! - a pretty slick email client for the late 90s

Castle of the Winds

Llamatron, Revenge of the Mutant Camels and Colourspace by Llamasoft (Jeff Minter) in 1991-2. I still have the Llama poster somewhere.

Nothing, it was never practical to mail my credit card info to the US from a world away (not that anyone I knew had credit cards back then).

Borland Delphi - My first programming language. They had a significant discount for students.

Encarta (used) - Never used it much, I got it pretty cheap. I was so impressed by the amount of information available on 1 CD

Corel Suite - Also cheap, I believe it came with WordPerfect

Goldwave and one mp3 song from Smash Mouth

https://www.goldwave.com/

I still miss Goldwave's easy expression editor. You could write one line of math and generate all sorts of waveforms, sweeps, etc.

I picked up Wolfenstein 3D on 5 1/4 floppy from a Dollar Store. Pretty good score for a 10 year old without internet access!

Actually purchased Wolf3d after doing an all night Prodigy dialup download of the shareware version on my friends dad's 386

I was a little kid, but I’m pretty sure I managed to beg my parents into buying a couple of the Commander Keen games.

Total Commander (well, it was Windows Commander back then) and I use it daily till today. The best purchase ever.

In the late 1990s, a Wingate proxy server for sharing an Internet connection to other students in the dorms.

Didn't know anyone with a credit card back then, and had zero software shops around, so I mostly pirated stuff. But I did pay for Thor for my early BBS, mail and Usenet days on my Amiga, later replaced with a paid for license for Forte Agent on Windows.

Neopaint for DOS. The rest are freeware I think, but I also made heavy use of: POVRay POVCAD Fractint

I actually bought a WinRAR license

mIRC - 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.

I'm pretty sure at some point I actually bought a WinRAR and Winzip license.

I paid for slipknot. An off line browser that saved all the pages you visited locally for browsing later. Usefull when the connection was down or the phone was needed for other functions (talking).

I was a Mac user back in the 1990s… bought some games like Taskmaker, Spacestation Pheta, Avernum (a 2000s remake of Exile from the 1990s). Later on, Carbon Copy Cloner.

I think I may have used a pirated Escape Velocity key.

Jazz Jackrabbit and Gazillionaire Deluxe - Played these for hours on end.

Trumpet Winsock in the 90s...it was the only way for me to connect to the Internet.

Commander Keen

AsEasyAs - the Lotus 123 compatible DOS spreadsheet

As a result, I remember getting lots of badly-printed shareware catalogues every month. Most of the games I bought in the late 80s and early 90s were full-price from Inter-mediates / Special Reserve or whatever they ended up calling themselves.

Is any work being done to preserve full versions of these sharewares?

MIRC and Doom.

Total Commander, or should I say "Windows Commander"?

Same here. Windows Commander when I bought it and still using all the time.

Not software but when we got our first computer, it had DigitalBlasphemy wallpapers. 20-something years later, I bought a subscription to relive some of the nostalgia.

Winamp and Descent, off of a CD included in a magazine iirc.

I bought the a386 assembler (which was written in assembler):

http://eji.com/a86/

My father bought the full version of Duke Nukem II. Still have the floppies. They don't read correctly anymore, but I think they're super cool to have.

(OP here...) Wow, you folks have reminded me of dozens of tools and games i had forgotten were shareware (like pkzip, Telix, mirc, Wolfenstein...).

Mix C Compiler - came with a great C tutorial book

I was too poor, but I did belatedly donate to the maker of Trumpet Winsock thanks to this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875

DSZ - Zmodem (Chuck Forsberg) WinRAR 4DOS PKARC

A CompuServe client whose name I forget.

(It might have been 'Oz'-something.)

Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Procomm Plus

BinkleyTerm - it was a front end to my BBS that enabled it to participate on FIDOnet.

Early 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?

What do you mean? I'm Jan Klaassen! You're all welcome!

I am not Jan Klaassen but WinZip thought I was.

The MED/OCTOMED soundtracker program on the amiga if I remember correctly.

DOOM

1) Wolfenstein but reskinned so you kill Barney the purple dinosaur instead of Nazis 2) Descent on 3 floppy disks 3) Some primitive CAD/3D modeling thingy, can't remember the name

No doubt I had a ton more, including a lot from magazines that came with CDs, but those top three were some of the earliest and most memorable.

BBedit is the only one i remember. Still going strong today!

MicroDot, a ZConnect point client for the Amiga

All Adobe Mac products in the late 80s. I know I'm stretching the definition of "shareware" to mean any software you haven't yet purchased.

ActionOutline

BBBS license.

Terminate, One Must Fall 2097

ARJ

Jazz jackrabbit

Doom

What I should have paid for:

UltraEdit

WinZip

Procomm Plus

mIRC

Forte Agent

Eudora Pro

Paint Shop Pro

Trumpet Winsock - got me connected to the Internet (so I can play my favorite MUDS)

SinkSub Pro!

TASKMAKER!

doom

PC-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.

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