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

 8 months ago
source link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38838585
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Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase? Ask HN: What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase? 21 points by sgbeal 8 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 26 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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