I think the 'human face' you mention is closer to the truth. 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 don't think the age is as important, a friend of mine was buying games since his early teens - but he also pirated stuff. My parents didn't even have credit cards back then (it was all still 'cheques' and lots of tiny local currencies). P.S: semi-seriously though: I remember it was hard to buy US shareware from Europe in the eighties/nineties. 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. So I borrowed my neighbour's C128D (nice machine: my C128 had a little issue) and. Turns out: the port of Ultima V to the Amiga was particularly bad. So I broke my wallet and bought the Amiga version of Ultima V. But I was not on the C64/C128 anymore, I had an Amiga. 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. 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). It didn't get much use but it was my introduction to source code control.Īs teenagers we were pirates sailing the high digital seas, our rooms filled with stashes of 5'1/4 and 3'1/2 floppies. What shareware, if any, did you purchase back in the day (and what did you use it for)?Įdit: there was a 4th: WinRCS was a Windows front-end to the RCS version control system. 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.

We played the hell out of it, multi-player on two 486/66's connected with a serial cable.Īll of the purchases arrived via snail-mail, with TheDraw and DOOM on floppy disks and 4DOS on a CD. In the 90s i used perhaps half a dozen pieces of shareware with any regularity but only purchased three (in no particular order):ġ) TheDraw - an ANSI/ASCII art editor, which i briefly used for creating animated screens for use with dial-up BBSes.Ģ) 4DOS/4NT was a replacement for DOS/Windows which offered features such as the command-line editing available in all modern shells.ģ) DOOM, which my two housemates chipped in to help buy. 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). Shareware was a common software business model back in the 1980s and 90s, though it's rare (or not called that) nowadays.

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