Happy New Year from WinBoards/WinWorld

Duff

Celebrating nine years of existence, more or less. I'm not going to make the effort to calculate how much of that time was spent offline as I've had a few drinks... WinWorld itself will be 10 years old as of this February. I brought it into existence in February 2003, as a shitty Bravenet website that was more or less a rip off of WinVision, followed by a god awful site created in The Print Shop Web Designer 1.0 - a piece of software I wish I could find again. I found the original CD, unfortunately it is scratched beyond recovery. Humble beginnings indeed.

If you wish take some time to browse through the old archived boards and your own old posts, and feel shame at how relatively dumb we all were ten years ago. My personal favorite which isn't viewable by anyone besides my fellow admins is the "I have commandeered WinWorld" thread and the Duff's Wild Adventures series created by Mr. Clean - which I still have stored somewhere amongst my 3TB of crap.

DeepFriedCookies

Winvision? My youth betrays me. All I know is Winworld was the first site I ever really downloaded a full OS from. I thought I was being an awesome badass pirate.. Ah, the years before bittorrent. xD Here's to another ten years of Winworld!

Duff

WinVision was the site where all us oldies first met, and laid the foundation for everything that followed. Downloads hosted in Yahoo Briefcases, a forum on Conforums, which has unfortunately been locked due to inactivity - for the longest time it was still viewable, albeit filled with spam.

BlueSun

Duff wrote:

WinVision was the site where all us oldies first met, and laid the foundation for everything that followed. Downloads hosted in Yahoo Briefcases, a forum on Conforums, which has unfortunately been locked due to inactivity - for the longest time it was still viewable, albeit filled with spam.

I think I was very briefly a member of the original conforums, but I didn't stick around. I ran across WinVision through a web search and I actually still have the old logo:



Computing.net was the first forum I ever really got into though. Eventually that led me to here.

Duff wrote:

If you wish take some time to browse through the old archived boards and your own old posts, and feel shame at how relatively dumb we all were ten years ago. My personal favorite which isn't viewable by anyone besides my fellow admins is the "I have commandeered WinWorld" thread and the Duff's Wild Adventures series created by Mr. Clean - which I still have stored somewhere amongst my 3TB of crap.

I'd rather not, actually. We were all kind of stupid back then (though we didn't think so at the time), but I'm particularly ashamed of some of my past choices / actions and I'd rather forget them.

DeepFriedCookies

But isn't part of growing up accepting your past decisions and actions, no matter how stupid they were? o.0 I mean, I find myself having to live with my stupid past every day. Fuuuuuck I was dumb.

BlueSun

DeepFriedCookies wrote:

But isn't part of growing up accepting your past decisions and actions, no matter how stupid they were? o.0 I mean, I find myself having to live with my stupid past every day. Fuuuuuck I was dumb.

Probably and if I accepted it, I'd probably be a better person... but I don't and I'm not.

Josh

DeepFriedCookies wrote:

But isn't part of growing up accepting your past decisions and actions, no matter how stupid they were? o.0 I mean, I find myself having to live with my stupid past every day. Fuuuuuck I was dumb.

To be honest, you still annoy the crap out of me with your out of the way belittling but I guess everyone goes through that stage.

As far as WinVision is concerned, I remember Yahoo briefcases and the (10 megabyte?) file size limits.

Anonymous

Josh wrote:

DeepFriedCookies wrote:

But isn't part of growing up accepting your past decisions and actions, no matter how stupid they were? o.0 I mean, I find myself having to live with my stupid past every day. Fuuuuuck I was dumb.

To be honest, you still annoy the crap out of me with your out of the way belittling but I guess everyone goes through that stage.

As far as WinVision is concerned, I remember Yahoo briefcases and the (10 megabyte?) file size limits.

If i remember right it was 20 MB, but i could be wrong, oh how time passes so quickly :(

noone

Duff wrote:

If you wish take some time to browse through the old archived boards and your own old posts, and feel shame at how relatively dumb we all were ten years ago. My personal favorite which isn't viewable by anyone besides my fellow admins is the "I have commandeered WinWorld" thread and the Duff's Wild Adventures series created by Mr. Clean - which I still have stored somewhere amongst my 3TB of crap.

Being one of the originals from the start, the best thing on here had to be the Windes poking. Who wouldn't want to make fun of a GUI made by a guy in Quebec with GWBASIC? Looking back at it, yeah, making it in BASIC was impressive, but that guy completely wasted his time. Unfortunately, the screenshots and downloads no longer work for that, so the newer guys can't see how horrid that piece of software was. If I was motivated enough, I'd wget that guy's entire website to see if I can find that software again, it's probably publicly accessible somewhere.

Duff

noone wrote:

. If I was motivated enough, I'd wget that guy's entire website to see if I can find that software again, it's probably publicly accessible somewhere.

Using HTTrack to mirror the entire site as I write this, with any luck it'll pull in the actual software.

noone

Duff wrote:

noone wrote:

. If I was motivated enough, I'd wget that guy's entire website to see if I can find that software again, it's probably publicly accessible somewhere.

Using HTTrack to mirror the entire site as I write this, with any luck it'll pull in the actual software.

Out of all his software, I think the Windes Xfeel was probably the worse coded. To write a ui in VB does not take too long to do, and all it looked like he did was pull a full screen window (no title bars) and apply button elements to bitmap files to generate menus. Nothing real impressive.

BlueSun

I think Windes was slightly before my time, but I was under the impression that it was all faked screen shots and that it was hard to actually get a copy of Windes because it didn't actually exist.

noone

BlueSun wrote:

I think Windes was slightly before my time, but I was under the impression that it was all faked screen shots and that it was hard to actually get a copy of Windes because it didn't actually exist.

All the Windes software was real, the only piece that wasn't able to get acquired for years was xFeel. Q back then actually purchased xFeel, since nobody could find it on that guy's server anywhere, but he never ended up getting it. About 4-5 years ago or so, someone tried again, I forget who, and it ended up on here. It looks like the guy threw it together in vb5 in about a hour or two.
The guy though did fake his screenshots on his website to make it appear that it looked almost like a real copy of windows, but what was delivered looked nothing like the screenshots.

Josh

I bought xFeel and never got a copy of it as well. The screenshots always reminded me of the flash spoof, Windows RG.

Duff

Well, a total scrape of the entire Mainasoft site yielded nothing except a couple zip files cointaining, well, zip.

Ah well, nothing of value was lost. Windes at one point or another did actually exist, cause I remember Q got it up and running to show us all how terrible it actually was.

Anonymous

Hey does anyone still have a copy of any windes version? i am dying to try this out!

DeepFriedCookies

Josh wrote:

DeepFriedCookies wrote:

But isn't part of growing up accepting your past decisions and actions, no matter how stupid they were? o.0 I mean, I find myself having to live with my stupid past every day. Fuuuuuck I was dumb.

To be honest, you still annoy the crap out of me with your out of the way belittling but I guess everyone goes through that stage.

As far as WinVision is concerned, I remember Yahoo briefcases and the (10 megabyte?) file size limits.

Oooooh I'm sorrrry. I only try to belittle GOW and Rougemac though, if that helps. If I do it to anyone else, it's purely unintentional. >.<

Also, do Yahoo Briefcases even exist still?

Anonymous

Nope they closed in 2009, it was a pain to download all of my files and put them on skydrive

Kirk

"&#91 wrote: »

GOD/OF/S3X"]Nope they closed in 2009, it was a pain to download all of my files and put them on skydrive

Should've had a backup other than Yahoo Briefcase...

DeepFriedCookies

Srsly, never have only one backup. x3

Josh

What I'm wondering is what could he possibly store on briefcase?

DeepFriedCookies

Lol, what if they used it like dropbox, and had important documents in there.. and every hacker online has their information now? xD

Anonymous

no,it was just an archive of product keys for abandonware apps [photoshop] and windows [xp,vista,98,ect] that really was all it was good for back then

Lupinthe3rd

I've got copies of WIndes ME and WIndes 2000. But they are barley 500KB between the two, was that right?

I never did try them and I may have Windes Xfeel somewhere as well.

noone

Lupinthe3rd wrote:

I've got copies of WIndes ME and WIndes 2000. But they are barley 500KB between the two, was that right?

I never did try them and I may have Windes Xfeel somewhere as well.

Those filesizes sound a bit right. At the time, I think only two people ever got the copy of Windes 2000 to install, because it would throw BASIC syntax errors during the "installation". Wasn't much difference between the two anyways. Windes ME was about the same, the "screensaver" even said Windes 2000 on it.

Josh

Maniasoft is a private company categorized under Utility Computer Software and located in Saint-Fabien, QC, Canada. Our records show it was established in and incorporated in . Current estimates show this company has an annual revenue of $495,312 and employs a staff of approximately 5. Companies like Maniasoft usually offer: Best System Utilities Software, Pc System Utilities Software, System Utilities Software.

noone

How the blue fuck do they make 500k$ a year in profits? That kinda makes me wonder.

DeepFriedCookies

My guess is selling drugs. Maniasoft was a front.

noone

I'm going to guess that they might do private contracting work that actually makes money and then makes dodgy applications to put online as a big joke or something.