![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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. I logged on to IRC and … promptly got booted for being logged into my local system as root. 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. 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”. ![]() 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. 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. This puts a new light to Total Commander being sold via (the author's surname) and the site having a very "non corporate" look (and thinking about it, has a very similar look :-P). ![]() 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. 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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