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Comment by quietbritishjim | Hacker News Reader

> If you're familiar with WinRAR, the Windows file compression tool, you'll know where this is going. WinRAR became infamous for offering a "30-day trial" that never actually expired.

I remember Paint Shop Pro being even more famous for this. I certainly got to day five hundred and something of the 30 day trial. I seem to remember an interview with the creator where he was grateful even to users that didn't pay because they helped sort knowledge of it. Sadly, I think later versions made it a harder limit.

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Same for MS-DOS, at least in the early years. Microsoft was completely aware just how often it was pirated, even by businesses, but just cared more about market share.

> Same for MS-DOS, at least in the early years

Same for Windows throughout its history, at least for home use. But unlike WinRAR, Windows didn't run on goodwill. MS understood the power of market share and network effects. The staying power of Windows in the enterprise comes from every new hire being familiar with Windows, its concepts, maybe even the tooling. The home user gets its dose for free because the enterprise user (and other shady deals) pays enough to cover for that.

Arguably the same is true for WinRAR. Nowadays is .zip or .7z, but .rar was very common for a long time, and wouldn't have been if WinRAR wasn't available for effectively free.

Rar is still common to this day for the same reason since the beginning: The scene standardized around rar in the 90s (after arj).

https://scenerules.org/

That's mostly because it allows files to be split up in parts, and as such making incremental transfers easier in case a connection is lost, right?

Incremental, as in, could be easily split accross several floppies.

These tools got famous in the scene before Internet was widespread.

But 7zip (the app) opens .rar files. How does that work? Does WinRAR not own the file format?

They do and as far as I know you cannot make a rar file without WinRaR or some other authorized software

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR_(file_format)

I got the same version back in the day (the company was still JASC and not Corel). Installers with the same try-before-you-buy wrapper in later editions did stop working as expected at the end of the trial period.

Someone mentioning it here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17653051

I used to love PSP back in the day. Is it still any good? I don’t much like Affinity Photo and unfortunately Adobe is completely insufferable.

Another, more current, example is the audio workstation Reaper. After the generous 60-day trial it keeps showing a message about it on every startup that cannot be dismissed for 5 seconds or so, but otherwise remains fully functional.

It’s great and one should totally buy it, of course. Doesn’t break the bank either.

I still use PSP 7. Not for anything serious or photo editing, but it's super fast and easy for anything simple like screenshot pasting and cropping. Although it doesn't handle a transparency channel well. For anything that needs that, I switch to Paint.net (and in truth Paint.net probably is superior overall, I just haven't bothered retraining my muscle memory to that rather than PSP.)

I still use PSP 4.1 on win10/11 after 30 years... loads in <1 second and does 99% of what I need in an image editor (barely took more than a couple seconds to load even 30 years ago on regular hardware)

for the remaining 1% of the time, the image editor in sharex does what I need at least for screenshots and rarely I need to use paint.net for something more nuanced...

5 sec delay would be fine for today's standard, where all app takes much longer to load

Sublime Text is another one. I paid for it, back when I used it, but everyone else I worked with simply dismissed the message after every n saves.

PSP eventually got sold to some for-profit company [sic]

Corel, it was Corel that bought them.

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