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

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 · 2 years ago

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.

nathan_douglas · 2 years ago

>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.

qup · 2 years ago

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 · 2 years ago

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

nathan_douglas · 2 years ago

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

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 · 2 years ago

> 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

allenu · 2 years ago

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.

iroddis · 2 years ago

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 · 2 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.

myself248 · 2 years ago

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 · 2 years ago

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.

ldargin · 2 years ago

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.

jclulow · 2 years ago

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 · 2 years ago

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 · 2 years ago

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 · 2 years ago

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!

nprateem · 2 years ago

Ha ha another student of fravia and +orc?

Clubber · 2 years ago

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_ · 2 years ago

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

bigmattystyles · 2 years ago

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 · 2 years ago

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.

badsectoracula · 2 years ago

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).

EvanAnderson · 2 years ago

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 · 2 years ago

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.

strict9 · 2 years ago

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 · 2 years ago

+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.

op00to · 2 years ago

Procomm plus!