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I remember PortableApps.com fondly from my childhood, I spent days building and customising USB sticks with auto-launching menus and all of the tools and utilit
by alias_neo 5y ago
I remember PortableApps.com fondly from my childhood, I spent days building and customising USB sticks with auto-launching menus and all of the tools and utilities I could ever need. Getting a bigger USB stick was always fun as I could put more stuff on there.
I used to enjoy just browsing the app list to find out about new software I'd never heard of.
Having not run Windows for most of my adult life, I haven't used it or even remembered it exists for a long time, I'm glad to see it's still doing well.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y agoSimilar story here. I also feel as though PortableApps was the catalyst that pushed me to look into open source software, and Linux.
- iszomer 5y agoI still remember downloading them onto a 3.5" floppy then onto a 100MB Zip for use on Windows 95. Fond memories of tinyapps.org and analogx.com back in those days.
- alias_neo 5y agoI never touched ZIP drives, went straight from floppies to USB sticks and CDs, I think I remember first using floppies to "upgrade" my Olivetti PC from DOS to Windows 3.1, was several diskettes, mid to late 90s perhaps? I was single-digit years old at the time.
- spongeb00b 5y agoI enjoyed that too. Mac user at home, but school only had Windows 2000 PCs with IE5, Office and not much else. Meanwhile I carried around my USB drive with Firefox (tabs and bookmarks!!) and Open Office so I could then edit the same docs on my Mac at home. I was always in fear of one day the IT dept figuring out how to block it.
- JohnTHaller 5y agoGlad it helped you out in your youth. You can still play around with it under Wine if you're a Linux user. And I'm prepping a Mac package with a Wine variant.
- alias_neo 5y agoThanks John. I'll try run it in wine if I get a free minute. I have children of my own now though so those are rare! I know round about the time I stopped using windows, auto-run was more challenging, had this had much/any effect on PortableApps?
- JohnTHaller 5y agoI created a simple tool folks could run locally to auto-run their PA.c drive on their PC. But you could just set Windows to open Explorer to the drive contents automatically and then double-click Start.exe, so it wasn't a huge inconvenience. And soon after we started working with cloud drives, too. And local. So it gradually became less relevant anyway. I even ditched the old autorun.inf files since some folks didn't know how to rename their drives after.