+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.

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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.

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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.