A nostalgic look back at the early 1990s shareware era, when Windows 3.1, CompuServe, AOL, and bulletin board systems created a market for indie software. The author recounts writing two shareware utilities — SYSBACK.EXE for backing up critical DOS/Windows config files, and WAVSHELL.EXE for managing WAV sound files — and selling them for $2 via checks mailed to a home address. Decades later, the author tracked down the original ZIP files on the internet, spun up a Windows 3.1 virtual machine using Oracle VirtualBox and MS-DOS 6.22 disk images, and successfully ran the old 16-bit executables again.
133 Impressions