Shareware worked like this. You got the whole game for nothing, off a BBS or CompuServe or a friend’s floppy, and it ran with something held back — a level, the two-player mode, a screen that asked you to pay. If you liked it you mailed a check to a P.O. box, and some weeks later a code came back that switched the rest of it on.
Somebody had to run the desk where the checks landed. Ours was called RHREG: a
Visual Basic 3 app, five Access reports, a small DLL that turned a customer’s
name into a twenty-character unlock code, and one 128K .MDB holding all of
it. The file was last written on January 4, 1995, and nothing has touched it
since.
Inside: 149 users, 126 registrations, dated February 23 through October 16 of 1994. A hundred and twelve of them paid. The total is $1,137.00. The largest single payment in the table is $20.
It was built for a catalog, not a game — there’s an appid on every
registration, because we had three products and expected more. One of the
comments in the table reads “Only person to register Concentration!”
The users table has a column named elec.
Ninety-one of the 149 rows leave it empty. Almost everything in the other fifty-eight is a CompuServe ID, that comma-separated pair that looked like an octal number and functioned as an address:
74037,3444
70651,1200
100113,362
The first of those is mine. Randy Weems, the other half of Red Herring, is user ID 2. Before there was a single customer in it, we had entered ourselves as rows one and two of our own customer database, ahead of everyone who ever paid us. It’s also the number I signed a letter about a naval game with that March.
Then about a dozen phone numbers, typed into the same column, because in 1994 a phone number was a defensible answer to the question how do I reach you electronically.
And two internet email addresses. Two, out of a hundred and forty-nine. One at
AOL. One in Australia, on a domain ending .oz.au, which is what Australian
addresses looked like before they were folded into plain .au.
I can’t reconstruct why I named the column elec instead of email, and I’d
be inventing a reason if I claimed to. But the name is doing something. It
refuses to commit. Four characters that decline to say what an electronic
address is, in a schema written by someone who had no way of knowing which
of these three things was going to be the answer — and who, going by the row
counts, would have bet on the wrong one.
The customer rows themselves stay closed. They’re real names and real street addresses belonging to people who mailed us a check thirty years ago and did not sign up for a website.
But there’s a comments column on the registrations table, and nine rows have something in it:
Lieutenant Commander U.S. Navy, very nice letter. Sent two $10 checks…?? Distributing Tanks with basketball statistics program. Skulls printed on check…way cool!
Nobody puts that field in a payments system now. We had a hundred and twenty-six customers, and I could picture most of them.