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

106 points by sgbeal ↗ HN
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.

201 comments

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ijhuygft776
I purchased Kali95 (lost the license)... and one fighting game similar to Mortal Kombat.... forgot the name. Pirated everything else including Windows...
conradfr
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.

ahazred8ta
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.

sgbeal
> 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!)

PopAlongKid
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).
cpach
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 (:
dantheta
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.
Cthulhu_
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.
entropyie
Neopaint for DOS. The rest are freeware I think, but I also made heavy use of: POVRay POVCAD Fractint
stavros
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).
EvanAnderson
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.

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whywhywhywhy
One Must Fall from Epic Megagames. Took close to two months to arrive iirc
sgbeal
> 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).

stavros
Interesting how far they've come, though they're just called Epic now.
Cthulhu_
I hope they bring back the MegaGames brand and start producing retro DOS games again, that would be cool.
Cthulhu_
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.

Cthulhu_
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.

jareklupinski
> 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

tikkabhuna
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...

guenthert
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.

sgbeal
> 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.

eternityforest
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.

influx
When I got a rea job, I registered Winrar. Felt good, and I still use it.
D13Fd
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.

Wildgoose
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.

BjoernKW
MicroDot, a ZConnect point client for the Amiga
theandrewbailey
Around 2005, I ordered Death Rally. I still have the CD. It came out in 1996, so I think it still counts :D
Daneel_
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/

vocatan
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

adrianmsmith
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...

johnnyballgame
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.
qubex
That’s absolutely hilarious.
weinzierl
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

xnorswap
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.
albeebe1
http://www.ThePalace.com in either 1994/95. That website looks like it's straight out of the 90s.
Cthulhu_
I bet the owner of that domain could earn a good payout by selling it.
hypercube33
Oh wow, I spent so many hours on this. And Cybertown
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