We recently talked about The Malware Museum, a special section on Archive.org where we can take a close look at different types of malware that affected MS-DOS in the '80s and '90s. A year ago they did something similar with a broad selection of games for that operating system, and now it's Windows 3.1's turn, with 1,500 shareware samples.
I imagine that our younger readers didn't have the pleasure of installing shareware distributed on floppy disks that came as gifts in different magazines dedicated to games and computing. In those times, buying magazines was for many the only way to get new programs, even though some publications could arrive several months late. The modern Web has cast into oblivion that artisanal search for software, and fundamentally the magic of shareware. As its name says, its essence was sharing the content by making copy after copy of each disk, and that is how true classics like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were distributed. Shareware resisted the evolution of operating systems very well, with a huge number of demos for DOS and Windows 3.x.
Thanks to the Internet Archive, today we have the possibility to enjoy nearly 1,500 shareware titles for Windows 3.1, with the help of DOSBox, in our browsers. As with the Malware Museum and its MS-DOS games, all we have to do is choose a program and double-click to load it. The database is still a bit dirty, and the vast majority of its entries are stored under the letter W (for Windows 3.1), but I found gems at the level of Out of This World.
I have also noticed that there are repeated entries, but that partly reflects the state of shareware in those years, with multiple very similar versions, and names subject to each user's creativity. As always, a couple of technical considerations: In general, programs should work well, although there may be speed losses, and sound is an aspect that online emulation doesn't fully resolve. Apart from that, I think Archive.org's new section deserves our time.
