You'd be lucky to have it all done in less than a week and a few hours of your time. How soon they forget!

You still have to today. A lot of stuff is Mac/Windows/Linux exclusive. Sure, I can run Windows stuff on Linux and vice versa if I'm tech savvy, but Mac stuff requires buying Apple hardware, so that's a massive barrier right there.

>figure out where and how you can buy it

Or you could just download it. The internet existed pre 200x as well.

> then manually enter a product key (fun!)

Honestly, it was fun. Much more fun than the phone-home, always-on telemetry and invasive DRM that act like rootkits & spyware we have today. Good luck playing older games you bought and paid for who's DRM require authentication from the publisher's servers that went offline years ago. Yeah, fun!

Back then, you paid for the product, you got your license and CD key, you owned it forever. No subscription rent seeking model BS.

Maybe I'm just old and cranky.

Outside of free software/shareware, there wasn't a lot of software available for download in the 90s. And compatibility was a lot jankier in that the base systems sold to consumers were insufficient to run a lot of popular software. For folks like you or me, probably not a problem (unless you happened to have a graphics card that wasn't supported) since we'd generally have obscene (by the standards of the day) amounts of hard disk and RAM, but Mom's computer might have 4M of RAM and a 10G hard drive.

Back in the floppy disk era the thing that always drove me nuts was that most (with very few exceptions) software vendors put the software key on the label of disk 1. Which would be in the drive when they asked you to enter the software key. I remember some OS/2 software that put it on disk 2 instead and I wanted to go to the company and kiss whoever it was who decided to do that.

Well - as recently as a couple years ago - even if it was a web-based tool, you would have to check which browser was supported.

Things have gotten better now that Microsoft has deprecated the entire IE-chain and moved to Chromium-based Edge. Things "just work".

I still have my Windows 98 product key and installer stashed away, purchased decades ago. And I actually used them a few months ago to stand up a VM to utilize an ancient printer.

Way better for me-the-consumer than the subscription-everything model. When software decides to go that way, I usually find a FOSS alternative or cling to the last standalone version.

Being prompted to create an account to use a word processor didn't come until later.

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First of all it's a free, open tool, MIT license, that is also hosted for free.

It loads instantly without an installation step. You just type in the URL and it works.

It's not a "productivity program" specifically as illustrated in the article.

The design is very simple, intuitive and deliberately minimalist, while it does quite a bunch of subtle things under the hood that harmonize with the overall goal of the program.

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Now there may have been tools kind of like this in the 90's. Not aware of any of them from the top of my head.

Excalidraw feels like a product of this time, and demonstrates some of the things we all enjoy about the web as an ecosystem. People compare it to some yesteryear product because of its purposeful feature set and look / feel, but name something from back then.

It's just sad that you even have to have that in your checklist of things nowadays. Like it's amazing when software doesn't ask you to make another damned online account and just lets you use it. (And it's good that this doesn't, yay.)

Hosted is a negative feature to me (other than for trying the software). You don't control the software installation.

Tomorrow you could wake up and try to continue your work, to discover that some feature is missing you were depending on, or new bugs are happening that weren't there and so on. Or your local storage is borked because it's not being read correctly by the newly installed code.

It's good if something is hosted for trying out, but you want it to be locally installable so you and your team can depend on it, and evaluate updates before rolling them out, and roll back bad updates.

"Has local storage" is another thing that is sad to see as having to tick off a checklist.

You insert the CD, install the software, and then it's ready to use. That's it.

To reiterate the quote from the article the GP mentioned:

> There's no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No OAuth. You're just in the product.

Of course, arguably one did have to pay for it and install it - but that was a one-off thing.

Yes, you could use Excel 95 by just double-clicking on an icon.

However, not only did you have to buy and install the software, which back in the day often meant going to an actual brick-and-mortar store to purchase a shrink-wrapped box labelled "Office 95", but it even required buying a specific type of computer with a specific operating system first.

In this specific case, that doesn't even take into account Microsoft's shady tactics of strong-arming vendors and OEMs into exclusively shipping Microsoft software with their products.

So, arguably, the barrier to entry still was a lot higher than with even the most obnoxious growth hacking tactics we see in many SaaS products today.

That said, I absolutely love the way Excalidraw are "onboarding" users.

It's just worth remembering that not everything went downhill with SaaS products (in fact, quite the opposite) and not everything was better "back in the day".

Makes me want to ditch the product on the spot. Yes, I've seen your emails. Yes, I will let you know if I need anything. No, I don't need a zoom call/onboarding video/introductory convo with your marketing team.

What I think those stats miss is that I will test a product with one email and if I decide to buy for a team will use a new account. So it looks like the conversion happened immediately skewing their sales/marketing strategy.

Shocking! Who would have thought? /s

I then read that it was free and open, so felt bad, but did notice an ad for Excalidraw+, which basically means my cynical first take is likely to come true eventually, as that is what the market will optimize towards.

That said, I'd also misunderstood the grandparent comment: they meant that it's a shame that Excalidraw is one of the few apps nowadays that have these features, even if the other ones also have advantages like not requiring an install.

It would display a dialog when you opened the program. Every. Damn. Time. Displayed a useful tip from the included documentation.

At the time, it felt like a huge, complicated, OLE application, a big departure from the previous version, Word 5.1.

I suspected that some members of the Word 6 product team felt the same about that startup dialog: at a loss to suggest anything productive for that "Useful product tip for today", they wrote down some inane safety tips.

"Welcome to Microsoft Word... You can hurt yourself if you run with scissors."