{"slug": "a-trip-down-shareware-lane", "title": "A trip down shareware lane", "summary": "In a nostalgic column, InfoWorld contributing editor Martin Heller recounts writing two shareware programs for Windows 3.x in the early 1990s — SYSBACK.EXE and WAVSHELL.EXE — and his recent attempt to resurrect them using Oracle VirtualBox and MS-DOS 6.22, with help from Anthropic's Claude AI. Heller, who learned BASIC in junior high in the mid-1970s, sold the utilities for $2 each via CompuServe, AOL, and BBSs, and was delighted to find the 16-bit executables still available online.", "body_md": "I hope you’ll indulge me this week as I take a break from my usual rantings about [agentic coding](https://www.infoworld.com/article/4199558/agentic-coding-is-everywhere.html) and meander down [memory lane](https://www.infoworld.com/article/3507440/when-the-pc-and-internet-were-new.html).\n\nI learned to code BASIC in the mid-1970s at my progressive junior high school. In math class. We took Fridays to learn about line numbers, loops, statements, and the amazing [ GOSUB](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/language/reference/user-interface-help/gosubreturn-statement), which was as close as we got to a function call. It strikes me that it was pretty early in the whole tech world to be teaching seventh graders to program, and I feel lucky.\n\nCoding faded into the background for me through high school, but soon afterward the arrival of Windows 3.0 and modems made writing software fun again. You could even earn a little profit. [CompuServe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe), [AOL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL), and [bulletin board systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system) (BBS) created a market for shareware.\n\nI bought a copy of Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.0 from Borland and a copy of *Mastering Turbo Pascal 6* by the great Tom Swan, and I learned the Pascal syntax. I remember being delighted to discover that Swan had also written a book specifically for [Turbo Pascal for Windows](https://archive.org/details/turbopascalforwi0000swan/mode/2up), and I devoured that too.\n\nI soon came up with an idea for a shareware project — System Backup. Any of you who can remember back to the DOS and Windows 3.x days will remember that there were four files — `AUTOEXEC.BAT`\n\n, `CONFIG.SYS`\n\n, `WIN.INI`\n\n, and `SYSTEM.INI`\n\n— that were crucial to one’s setup. You’ll also remember that it wasn’t uncommon to twiddle with these files to eke out an extra measure of performance from the system. Backing those files up was critical to the tweaking, so I wrote `SYSBACK.EXE`\n\nto do the job quickly and easily.\n\nWindows 3.1 introduced the amazing feature of `*.wav`\n\nfiles — sound through your tinny PC speaker! That led me to write `WAVSHELL.EXE`\n\n, which listed all your sound files and made them easy to play.\n\nI guess I didn’t have much faith in the value of my shareware because I released it into the wild of the pre-internet shareware market for a measly $2. People soon started sending me checks in the mail — my address was in the About Box, with a plea to pay for the software. Soon I added a licensing scheme and a “nag screen” that would go away if the user entered a valid license key. I actually made a bit of money.\n\nEventually both programs became unnecessary as Windows grew more functional, and I abandoned things. I’m sure all that code is on a hard drive in a landfill somewhere.\n\nBut that doesn’t mean that `SYSBACK`\n\nand `WAVSHELL`\n\ndon’t live on!\n\nLast week, on a whim, I went searching to see if I could find any remnants of my glory days. Although it took a while, I was delighted to discover that both programs had clung to life in the dark crevices of the internet.\n\nI found `WAVSHELL.ZIP`\n\nand `SYSBACK.ZIP`\n\nand downloaded them. Sure enough, there were the files — the 16-bit Windows executables, along with the accompanying READMEs formatted for Windows Write, the simple word processor that came with Windows 3.1.\n\nSo, what to do? Naturally I fired up Claude and asked how to get all this running. It suggested I give Oracle VirtualBox a try. At first I tried an open-source DOS version, but soon ran into conflict with memory managers and Windows. Tweaking `CONFIG.SYS`\n\nlike the old days didn’t seem to make a difference.\n\nThis led to downloading a set of `*.img`\n\nfiles of MS-DOS 6.22. I mounted the first disk in the A: drive of the virtual machine. (For you youngsters, the A: drive was a floppy disk — maybe you remember those?) I had to do a virtual version of the old disk shuffle for the three floppies, and then do the same to install Windows. Everything installed and ran like clockwork, and soon enough, Windows 3.1 was up and running.\n\nThen, of course, I had to figure out how to get the files from my modern system to this ancient OS. This led me to WinImage, a shareware program (!) that builds floppy disk images for you. I built an image, copied the files onto the “disk,” and mounted it in the A: drive in the VirtualBox machine. I copied the files to the virtual hard drive, and behold!\n\nFoundry\n\nThere they are, in all their glory. I have to say, it was quite a thrill. And they actually work!\n\nAnyway, it was fun to remember all those halcyon days of CompuServe, 2400 BAUD modems, and getting checks from strangers in the mail. It seems strange to me that 35 years from now, some software developer will be writing a column about the deep dark past when people used to actually write code, argue about what programming languages were best, and, who knows, even had to type things out by hand.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-trip-down-shareware-lane", "canonical_source": "https://www.infoworld.com/article/4205065/a-trip-down-shareware-lane.html", "published_at": "2026-08-05 09:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-05 09:28:23.454402+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools"], "entities": ["Martin Heller", "InfoWorld", "Oracle VirtualBox", "MS-DOS 6.22", "Claude", "Anthropic", "CompuServe", "AOL"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-trip-down-shareware-lane", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-trip-down-shareware-lane.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-trip-down-shareware-lane.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-trip-down-shareware-lane.jsonld"}}