What 1980s/90s-era shareware did you purchase?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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++).
I literally mailed cash to, I think, the author of ShapeShifter for the Amiga - a Mac emulator:
https://shapeshifter.cebix.net/
…or - memory is hazy - maybe it was more esoteric than that - was there a fast graphics driver for ShapeShifter by a different author?
Edit:
Checked my old email and, yes, a graphics ‘driver’ called ‘Savage030’ which I think used the 68030’s MMU somehow to make Mac 256 color graphics work full speed on the Amiga’s AGA system. I mailed cash to Hungary for it, which in 1997 felt pretty exotic - just a few years before that it was behind the Iron Curtain.
The DICE C compiler for the Amiga (must have been 1991 or 1992, not sure if it was actually shareware though, but it wasn't a "proper" boxed product either).
I exchanged Deutsche Mark into a hundred-dollar bill, put that into an envelope with backaddress and sent it over to the US. A couple of weeks later I got the reply with a 3.5" floppy disc (or was it two?) and a handwritten letter by Matt Dillon (later of DragonFly BSD fame).
Good times! (and one of the best software investments I ever made)
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.
VGA Planets. Such a great game, advanced to its time!
It was a Civilization-like game, but in space, with lots of pop culture references, complex like Dwarf Fortress, and turn-based. Each turn was uploaded to a BBS or Usenet, and a host put all the players' turns together every few days, then sent the turn files back. So fun.
Doom, Decent, Hexen, Quake, and KidPix. Everything else was purchased full price (Marathon, Photoshop, MS Flight Simulator, Corel Draw, Word Perfect, Compuserve). There was other software but that was mainly it in the late 80s/early 90s.
Mac kid until 91 or so.
Somewhere around 92 is when we got our first windows machine and I discovered Id Software.
By mid-90s we had IRC and the wonderful Wild West that DCC brought. By late 90s we had P2P services like Napster and LimeWire.
Slicks 'n' Slide, still my gold standard for multiplayer 2D racing, Super Cars 2 on Amiga is the only one that came close: https://www.slicksnslide.com
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 (:
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.
From what I can remember - these are from the era of classic Mac OS 7, 8, 9:
Typestyler,
Transmit,
Captain FTP,
WebDesign,
Marathon & its sequels,
Escape Velocity & its sequels.
It didn't run speedily on the 286 IBM clone that we had, but it was pretty amazing to me at the time (ca. 1993)
Telemate, the amazing terminal program, with its own multitasking (on my IBM PC 5150) text windowing system. It allowed me to write all my school papers while BBSing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kye_(video_game) It was charityware and me and a friend pooled our pocket money to pay the 20 pounds when we were 10.
But, I pirated the vast majority of shareware I used as a teen (at least the ones with time limits or other limitations). Ironic considering that I released later a shareware myself.
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.
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.
Escape Velocity. Take that Cap’n Hector!
pkZip - Phil Katz's archive program. pkzip 2.04g was the bees knees for a very long time. That, plus a stack of floppy disks with labels was my version control system for a decade.
Vern Berg(sp?) - LIST.COM - a file viewer, with a hex mode. I ended up writing my own clone, look
TurboPower Software - EDWIN - a wonderful text editor, had the ability to record and run macros.
I used Borland's SkidKick and Turbo Pascal all the time.
I don't remember the name of the image viewing program we all used.
Jacaranda Jim! What an awesome text adventure. Written by Graham Cluley who went on to do awesome things.
I still have the receipts from when my dad bought GraphicConverter (with a carbon-paper credit card receipt in DM) and ZTerm for Mac back in the mid-90s.
GraphicConverter is still actively maintained today (although that license isn’t still good), and ZTerm lasted (with no changes) to the Intel era.
One Must Fall from Epic Megagames. Took close to two months to arrive iirc
I purchased Kali95 (lost the license)... and one fighting game similar to Mortal Kombat.... forgot the name. Pirated everything else including Windows...
When I got a rea job, I registered Winrar. Felt good, and I still use it.
Sidekick - the first TSR (Terminal Stay Ready) app I can remember on DOS. I was a kid and didn't really need a PIM, but it was really cool and I think I convinced my dad to buy it.
Not Shareware exactly, but once I started earning money in the mid 90s, I purchased physical copies of Slackware on CD-ROM to support the distro that taught me Linux. It was also much more convenient than downloading dozens of floppies from ftp.funet.fi or whatever FTP server I was using at the time.
As for my Amiga and C64 days, I was too young to have a lot of money, and piracy was rampant in Europe, where I lived. Even if I had wanted to pay I wouldn't have known how to send money overseas.
I don't remember my early shareware purchases, but I made some for utilities. I do remember receiving by mail a floppy for his freeware from someone who first sent me anonymous ftp instructions. I don't remember what utility software that floppy contained.
I recently paid for several license keys. My most recent license keys are for AirServer, which is an excellent Apple TV emulator for Windows and Netspot, which is a WiFi heatmapper.
Shareware is alive and well on the App Store.
I was hoping to be surprised to see WinRAR on many people's list, and as of right now I see exactly zero people purchased WinRAR as I sadly expected.
I didn't purchase it either.
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...
GoldEd (GED) for the Amiga back in... probably 1992 or 93. Although the Amiga already had good text editors (CED to name one), GED had syntax highlighting and I seem to recall also macros and keyword searching in sources and AmigaGuide docs (think HTML years before the WWW). Back then I was learning the AmigaE language (another gem of that time) and GED turned out quite useful when compiling or simply navigating code.
Bunch of games, mainly from the big names (Apogee and Epic). Only "indie" game I can think of right now is Megazeux, though there might have been others.
Oh, there was one from a local guy that I'm not sure ever spread beyond our local BBSs, and I've never seen a reference to it on the Internet. I keep meaning to upload it to archive.org at some point since I may be the only one in the world who has it.
mIRC, a windows .HLP authoring tool, an animated GIF HTML button generator, a graphics DLL for Windows. I think I might've licensed a QWK Mail reader for BBS use as well.
I also sold a few shareware apps in the late 90's and early 2000's. Mostly command-line email and/or command-line something-or-other utilities.
Nothing. I think that the only program I ever bought was some incremental backup software for Windows XP for my laptop at home but that was some years later, in the 2000s. For everything else, free or open source solutions were good enough for me even when I still used Windows.
By the way, I'm using rsnapshot for my backups now.
I purchased a license for the shareware XV, for gif/png/tiff/jpg etc, by John Bradley.
Over the years I've added a few patches. I still use it more than any other tool for looking at my photos.
I also paid for Mup (for writing music scores) back when it was still shareware. I'm using it all the time still.
I'm pretty sure I bought golded from Odinn Sorensen (yes 2 n's lol). And frontdoor. Not entirely sure though.
I pirated a lot back then because it was often simply impossible to pay for US based software from Holland. I was too young for a credit card and those hardly existed in Holland anyway in those days.
I bought Doom and Quake (and several map packs) of course. But my real treasure trove was a deal on a bunch of early id Software produced Softdisk distributed games. It included some FPS games that are almost entirely unknown these days and pre-date Doom and some relatively unknown Commander Keen stuff.
I only recall ever purchasing one piece of shareware: TaskMaker [1]. It was a relatively simple game, but I recall the betrayal at the end blew my 12-year-old mind...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TaskMaker
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
Around 2005, I ordered Death Rally. I still have the CD. It came out in 1996, so I think it still counts :D
Pharaoh’s Tomb
Commander Keen
Think I got the shareware versions from The Software Labs catalog or maybe another one. Of course the original Castle Wolfenstein. I ordered a lot of shareware games and it was like playing the lottery in terms of finding something good, but CW was a mind-blowing change.
Besides my bad economy in the late 80's and start of 90's, as far I remember it was not so trivial from my country to pay for shareware or most commercial programs back then. If I had to pay for just one thing, probably would had done it with Sidekick.
Halloween Harry. Descent. Harpoon (I think there was a shareware version). Escape velocity.
- Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Decent
- Telix and OS/2 terminal software for modems
- PKZip and other archivers
- Composer 669 -- 8 channel tracker on a 386 using flat protected memory
- Megaroids -- Asteroids clone for Atari ST
- Kedit -- large-buffer text editor for OS/2
- DeScribe -- word processor for OS/2
Of all the games the Decent series was my addiction, got the flight stick/throttle and just couldn't get enough of being
almost lost in 6-DoF trying to stay alive! This might have been a shrink-wrap game though, can't recall.
I still have my 3.5" PKZip floppy with the personalized license, and a copy of Procomm Plus (with the nice manual) somewhere.
I was using CP/M for most of the 80's and switched to Linux in the early 90's, so aside from commercial software purchases (like Borland C, DesqView/X, some games, and Linux OSF Motif), there wasn't much else. I did purchase a Yggdrasil Linux (live) CD too, but I'm not sure if that counts. I also signed up for 386BSD (via FAX), but Linux arrived first so I never did much BSD. I had a subscription to the Slackware Linux CDs too.
Raptor - Call of the shadows
I think my brother-in-law gave me a free copy of Doom in '93. It turned my gaming world upside-down, and I sent off for the full version and did it again when Doom 2 came out. I was also an early customer for Ultraedit, which I used on personal projects (and at work, against policy) for at least 10 years. Late in the '90s I paid for the QVCS version control system, and later, Enterprise QVCS, which was a multi-user client-server system that I used for personal and consulting projects. Good stuff.
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.
I'd be interested to hear about creative DRM policies that were used. I remember some used a secret hash key that seemed to be easily cracked with cracker apps/software.
I'd be interested to hear about creative DRM policies were used. I remember some used a secret hash key that seemed to be easily cracked with cracker apps/software.
ARJ, maybe a Zip program, misc. BBS software, and IIRC, I sent in a payment for ZModem or some terminal program that used ZModem, but that got returned to me unopened.
Alive and Kicking to stop my dial-up ISP from booting me for inactivity during large (600 MB!) downloads. Mostly used it with Gigex, a shareware games service.
Doom - duh!
Wacky Wheels, (top down hotseat racing game!)
actual software however... never.
I vaguely remember buying the DOS SimCity. You could play it without a license key, but disasters like tornados and fires would start appearing everywhere.
For some reason, TV tuner cards always came with garish, clunky software. This is minimal, reasonably native, and simply did the job well.
TheBat! - a pretty slick email client for the late 90s
Llamatron, Revenge of the Mutant Camels and Colourspace by Llamasoft (Jeff Minter) in 1991-2. I still have the Llama poster somewhere.
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).
Borland Delphi - My first programming language. They had a significant discount for students.
Encarta (used) - Never used it much, I got it pretty cheap. I was so impressed by the amount of information available on 1 CD
Corel Suite - Also cheap, I believe it came with WordPerfect
I picked up Wolfenstein 3D on 5 1/4 floppy from a Dollar Store. Pretty good score for a 10 year old without internet access!
Actually purchased Wolf3d after doing an all night Prodigy dialup download of the shareware version on my friends dad's 386
I was a little kid, but I’m pretty sure I managed to beg my parents into buying a couple of the Commander Keen games.
Total Commander (well, it was Windows Commander back then) and I use it daily till today. The best purchase ever.
In the late 1990s, a Wingate proxy server for sharing an Internet connection to other students in the dorms.
Didn't know anyone with a credit card back then, and had zero software shops around, so I mostly pirated stuff.
But I did pay for Thor for my early BBS, mail and Usenet days on my Amiga, later replaced with a paid for license for Forte Agent on Windows.
Neopaint for DOS.
The rest are freeware I think, but I also made heavy use of:
POVRay
POVCAD
Fractint
I actually bought a WinRAR license
mIRC - after pirating it for years I paid for it in the early 00:s, such great example of free-forever shareware with a persistent design goal. Did enjoy learning simple programming in mIRC scripts on a pirated copy in the 90s as a poor kid.
I'm pretty sure at some point I actually bought a WinRAR and Winzip license.
I paid for slipknot. An off line browser that saved all the pages you visited locally for browsing later. Usefull when the connection was down or the phone was needed for other functions (talking).
I was a Mac user back in the 1990s… bought some games like Taskmaker, Spacestation Pheta, Avernum (a 2000s remake of Exile from the 1990s). Later on, Carbon Copy Cloner.
I think I may have used a pirated Escape Velocity key.
Jazz Jackrabbit and Gazillionaire Deluxe - Played these for hours on end.
Trumpet Winsock in the 90s...it was the only way for me to connect to the Internet.
Commander Keen
AsEasyAs - the Lotus 123 compatible DOS spreadsheet
As a result, I remember getting lots of badly-printed shareware catalogues every month. Most of the games I bought in the late 80s and early 90s were full-price from Inter-mediates / Special Reserve or whatever they ended up calling themselves.
Is any work being done to preserve full versions of these sharewares?
Total Commander, or should I say "Windows Commander"?
Not software but when we got our first computer, it had DigitalBlasphemy wallpapers. 20-something years later, I bought a subscription to relive some of the nostalgia.
Winamp and Descent, off of a CD included in a magazine iirc.
My father bought the full version of Duke Nukem II. Still have the floppies. They don't read correctly anymore, but I think they're super cool to have.
(OP here...) Wow, you folks have reminded me of dozens of tools and games i had forgotten were shareware (like pkzip, Telix, mirc, Wolfenstein...).
Mix C Compiler - came with a great C tutorial book
DSZ - Zmodem (Chuck Forsberg)
WinRAR
4DOS
PKARC
A CompuServe client whose name I forget.
Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Procomm Plus
BinkleyTerm - it was a front end to my BBS that enabled it to participate on FIDOnet.
Early 2000s, Tinyspell.
Back in the XP days when a spellchecker was not a standard part of an OS, some folks glued a keylogger and spellchecker together to give universal spelling correction.
It would beep when you misspelled something and had a global keystroke to pop up a replacements menu.
It was incredibly-annoying in cmd.exe until they added an option to ignore certain apps, and I still miss it.
Now, I wonder if you could do something similar with a local LLM but just have it beep when you type something you might regret?
What do you mean? I'm Jan Klaassen! You're all welcome!
/s
I am not Jan Klaassen but WinZip thought I was.
The MED/OCTOMED soundtracker program on the amiga if I remember correctly.
1) Wolfenstein but reskinned so you kill Barney the purple dinosaur instead of Nazis
2) Descent on 3 floppy disks
3) Some primitive CAD/3D modeling thingy, can't remember the name
No doubt I had a ton more, including a lot from magazines that came with CDs, but those top three were some of the earliest and most memorable.
BBedit is the only one i remember. Still going strong today!
MicroDot, a ZConnect point client for the Amiga
All Adobe Mac products in the late 80s. I know I'm stretching the definition of "shareware" to mean any software you haven't yet purchased.
Terminate, One Must Fall 2097
What I should have paid for:
UltraEdit
WinZip
Procomm Plus
mIRC
Forte Agent
Eudora Pro
Paint Shop Pro
Trumpet Winsock - got me connected to the Internet (so I can play my favorite MUDS)
PC-Write. Bought the sources, too.
PKZIP. Was pretty much required.
Quarterdesk Desqview. Used it for 6 months, then switched to Linux.
And of course, DOOM .. Wolfenstein .. Spectre VR ..