6 ms·

Nullsoft, 1997-2004 (2004)

335 points by downbad_ 6mo ago

lofaszvanitt 5mo ago
Winamp still the best.
- dramalama 5mo ago
  it really does that llama thing
  - blkhawk 5mo ago
    nice advertiser friendly self censoring there :P
downbad_ 6mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559415
- unit149 5mo ago
  [dead]
tombert 5mo ago
I am always confused when BigTechCos buy SmallCos and then unceremoniously kill them off fairly shortly after. I guess it's basically to cannibalize the source code?
- htx80nerd 5mo ago
  they want a popular thing, then that thing falls under the control of Big Business Meeting Thinking , and suffers the expected fate
- okanat 5mo ago
  Source code is only useful when you want the actual product, which is the rare case. Most of the time they want the patents, naming rights or just customers.
- munk-a 5mo ago
  Eh, I think that does happen but is much less likely then either acquihiring or killing a potential competitor.
- lorecore 5mo ago
  This was during the dotcom bubble and AOL/Time Warner need to optically look like they were doing something relevant with the internet to justify their valuation. It was pure messaging, with a bit of killing a threat on the side.
  - ConceptJunkie 5mo ago
    Their whole business model at the time seemed to be "making dubious acquisitions".
    - giantrobot 5mo ago
      They lost money on every transaction but intended to make it up with volume.
- arjie 5mo ago
  It could just be a failed acquisition but an variant sometimes happens. OpenAI bought Statsig and then sold the Statsig brand and customer base to Amplitude.
- esseph 5mo ago
  The want the: developers, IP, customers, to kill some competition, or some combination.
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  The usual play is to acquire the customers and brand, with the team as a bonus. Except for rare unique products, the source code might not matter at all. They're after the business, brand, and customers. Having been in acquired SmallCos a couple times: There are always plans and justifications involving the products being acquired, but most don't survive impact with the acquiring company. People in a BigCo have their little fiefdoms established and everyone resists the sudden appearance of new developers and new code that weren't under their control. To be fair it goes both ways and the SmallCo developers who were previously in charge of everything don't like giving up control of parts of the system to the established teams and procedures in the BigCo.
- rkagerer 5mo ago
  It's because BigCo's tend toward decisions with dumb outcomes, while SmallCo's still benefit from the strategic direction of their founders. Although not a hard and fast rule, if you take a good look at where innovation occurs you'll often find the most successful products of big tech companies (after the initial one that made them big in the first place) came from acquisitions. Just look at Google's case: Android, YouTube, Maps, etc. Sometimes the aquisition doesn't pan out as planned, or they were just after the talent or to snuff out a potential competitor / snag its customers (like Postini), or it was a dumb move in the first place and the numbers finally bore that out. BigCo's don't usually have the same determined, long-term dedication to their acquisitions as the people who the founded them, so you also see premature shedding of ventures that could have a ton of potential over time.
- flomo 5mo ago
  Not complicated. Thing shows banner ads. Only makes money when expenses are zero.
- b00ty4breakfast 5mo ago
  sometimes it's an acquisition of some product and sometimes it's to explicitly to kill off the thing without concern for any product.
- gopalv 5mo ago
  > when BigTechCos buy SmallCos and then unceremoniously kill them off fairly shortly after There's many reasons, but in general incompetence, malice and small crumbs problem. I've done my small share of M&A DD work as an engineer, which was a lot of fun, but the results on my sanity and my outlook was bad. On one hand, you get to go talk to a core founder of a company and they're entirely open to you picking their brain on "Why this" / "Did it pay off?" on pure eV math they did in their heads. On the other, you see what happens after your recommendation and it is not within your control to change any of it. Incompetence is generally "Please rewrite this software by our practices" devops hell or "Let's look for better customers for this product, ignore the old ones" in the ICP land. Google and dodgeball comes to mind. Malice is more clear cut, where "Let's buy it and shut it down, so that we don't have a threat to our business" - I'm eagerly waiting to see what happens with Groq and Nvidia for example. AWS buying Groq would've been massively different. Classic case in point is Apple buying Fingerworks & shutting it down, but launching the iPhone. Lastly, there's the small crumbs problem (or as it has been famously said "Do not anthropomorphize the lawn mower"). A company can get bought and the product doesn't really add great value to the buyer, beyond getting a few people who really know the space. The small number of people them gets redistributed into a neat set of existing reqs where they just accelerate the existing company's products based on that knowledge or in general fail to surface back to make a significant ripple in the future. For example, I am wondering what will happen to Promptfoo after OpenAI.
- Lammy 5mo ago
  It's how The System kills something it wants dead without triggering Streisand Effect and creating a huge backlash. It punishes with success.
lorecore 5mo ago
Publishing Gnutella while being acquired by a greedy media company was such a baller move.
- rickcarlino 5mo ago
  The network still lives, even today. This is so underrated.
  - dexwiz 5mo ago
    We had a private network on campus circa 2010. Streaming was up and coming but not huge. Gnutella was great on the gigabit intranet. You could download entire HD movies in minutes where conventional torrents may be hours.
    - rickcarlino 5mo ago
      Gnutella is a mild obsession for me. The way that the protocol was designed and also the way that it saw a mainstream adoption has always fascinated me. For anyone reading this thread who is curious, I wrote a functional client this year for fun: https://github.com/RickCarlino/gnutella-bun-client/ https://github.com/RickCarlino/gnutella-bun-client/
      - gonesilent 5mo ago
        It took a ton of work to keep the network clean. I did the gnutella.wego site back in the day. Gnutella was made when napster had 50 users and we all told him he was fcked. So gnutella was made to not use servers. Justin gave napster the code for song length and such to integrate with Napster.
        rickcarlino 5mo ago
        Have you blogged about this or written it down? I would love to hear more about this piece of history and it seems that the history is slowly fading.
Fwirt 5mo ago
For anyone who was also curious what Justin Frankel got up to after the speculation at the end of the article, he founded Cockos Software and is the lead developer on the excellent REAPER DAW.
- misnome 5mo ago
  Oh, I had no idea. It's been a few years since I used it in anger but it was a very pleasant package to use, with an extremely friendly licensing scheme (purchasing a permanent license for <current.X> got you all releases up until version <current+1.max>)
  - entropicdrifter 5mo ago
    Not to mention it's about as easy to use without a license as WinRAR, so you can trial it indefinitely and then pay the mere $60 for it when you're ready to release some music commercially
- sbuttgereit 5mo ago
  Easily one of the best values in commercial software if you have a need for what it does. I think I paid something ~$70 a couple of years ago. While there's a limitation on the number of updates you get based on release version, I'm still getting updates under the license a couple years on. All that and you get a genuinely professional level tool for much less than what similar software from competitors offer. I couldn't more highly recommend it.
  - ethin 5mo ago
    I'm no musician but I paid for a Reaper license just because the software is so good and useful and the licensing scheme is so reasonable. Like, it's kind of hard to beat that.
SyneRyder 5mo ago
For those who might not know: > With Nullsoft gone and Frankel spending his time building a special-effects computer for his electric guitar... I don't know what happened to the Jesusonic he was building then, but Justin Frankel ended up creating Reaper, the cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux digital audio workstation that is a solid Pro Tools competitor in a mere 16 MB download: https://www.reaper.fm/ https://www.reaper.fm/ The installer for the whole DAW is smaller than most add-on VST effects. Some of my favorite albums have been recorded with Reaper, and obviously I'm a Reaper fan and use it too. Just like Winamp, you can pay for it, but if you really can't afford it, there's no time limit and it won't stop you from using it. Showing my age here, but if you have a copy of the Walnut Creek CD-ROMs with demoscene archives, there's a demo by "Nullsoft" from pre-Winamp days hiding somewhere in there as well. EDIT: Aww, fwirt beat me to it while I was typing! I guess I'll leave my comment here to add the Nullsoft demo mention. Found a link to his MSDOS demos here: https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1618 https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1618 EDIT TWO: You can run his Ademo demo on archive.org, type "ademo 1" at the C:\ prompt in the web based DOSbox to run: https://archive.org/details/demoscene_Ademo-Nullsoft https://archive.org/details/demoscene_Ademo-Nullsoft
- AlyssaRowan 5mo ago
  It's a straight line from Jesusonic to Reaper: Jesusonic JSFX script is in Reaper, and there's a whole selection of stock JS plugins that come with it and it's actually quite easy to program.
  - kgwxd 5mo ago
    I always figured JSFX was javascript :) I've used reaper and plenty of jsfx plugins for a long time, just never bothered to look under the hood.
    - daniel_sim 5mo ago
      Whoa TIL. Jsfx feels way cooler now. Fwiw jsfx is easy fodder for llm’s if you need a quick utility. Mine was a midi channel filter
jackconsidine 5mo ago
Went down the Frenkel (Nullsoft founder) rabbit hole. Check out his forum where they've recently discussed AI bots scraping his forum [0]. Or his question submission page; he hasn't "left a reasonable question unanswered since 2009" [1] > nothing specific against cloudflare, but the point of the internet is that it's decentralized and I'd hate to contribute against that (though we already do somewhat, hosting on aws etc). anyway our homegrown solution is working nicely these days! for now - Justin January 2026 [0] https://www.1014.org/index.php?article=930#cl3 https://www.1014.org/index.php?article=930#cl3 [1] https://www.askjf.com/ https://www.askjf.com/
ecliptik 5mo ago
My favorite Nullsoft software that came out the end of this era was WASTE [1]. Peer-to-peer (back when P2P was all the rage), encrypted, decentralized private networks. Group of friends and I used it post-college as a way to share files and chat, and was much better than AIM or other instant messaging at the time. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE
- gh02t 5mo ago
  I always thought WASTE was so cool, but my family was pretty late get off of dialup to be able to actually use it. Sounds like it's still around in some form, do people actually use it nowadays?
- samplatt 5mo ago
  WASTE became popular in our area just as LANning was ending its heyday. Even now I think the whole course of technology could have been altered if WASTE was utilised in a "corporate VPN" fashion, instead of the rise of Juniper routers and Sharepoint spaces, we could have had much simpler secure work-collaboration protocols.
- BLKNSLVR 5mo ago
  WASTE introduced me to Thomas Pynchon. Thank you Justin!
ethagnawl 5mo ago
It's a shame some of those other names mentioned didn't wind up fading into obscurity.
DeathArrow 5mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBY52n7luM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBY52n7luM8
iluvcommunism 5mo ago
[dead]
zkmon 5mo ago
Winamp! My first experience of listening to serious music from computer.
- bcraven 5mo ago
  A community version survives to this day: https://getwacup.com/ https://getwacup.com/
mauricio 5mo ago
Looking back at this, has there been a maverick company like Nullsoft since then? It's sad, but AOL may have killed off the last one.
- hunter2_ 5mo ago
  Not a "company" but the SQLite story gives me maverick vibes. https://sqlite.org/consortium.html https://sqlite.org/consortium.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSVgeMoXJTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSVgeMoXJTs
Octoth0rpe 5mo ago
That year range definitely surprised me. In my generation I suspect many of us think of winamp as being just sort of always there, but of course it wasn't. When you add it up, it really only existed for <25% of the history of the web (taking 1996 -> 2026 as the time range, I think 1996 is defensible start for when the web becaome accessible to some portion of people in the first world). Hell, I probably have coworkers who were born after the dissolution of nullsoft (interns anyway).
- sulam 5mo ago
  I won’t nitpick too hard because the percentage doesn’t move much, but Netscape went public in ‘95 so it’s got to be before that. The minimum would be ‘91 (first website) but that’s too early. Super geeky but I will peg it at April 1 1995, which was the first release of Apache HTTP.
  - Octoth0rpe 5mo ago
    The difference comes down to focusing on what we think of as the core infrastructure of the internet (the first modern browser, apache), versus _access_. I think there was a pretty big jump around 1996, 1997 in dialup subscribers. To get geekier though, we could actually peg it at late 1993/1994, the eternal september. I think I'll stick with 1996 though :)
p2detar 5mo ago
Additionally to Winamp, I guess what I will always remember Nullsoft with is also "NSIS - Nullsoft Scriptable Install System" [0]. In a previous job I sat down, read the docs and wrote a Windows-Installer for our product using this thing, since management didn't want to pay for InstallShield. What made quite an impression on me back then was the fact that the scripting language somewhat resembles assembly. [1] Also, NSIS had/has a tool called "NSIS Dialog Designer" which I used to design the Installer forms. It was quite the fun experience and I'm pleasantly surprised that NSIS is supported to this day [2]. 0 - https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Main_Page https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Main_Page 1 - https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Check_whether_your_application_is_running https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Check_whether_your_application_i... 2 - https://github.com/NSIS-Dev/nsis https://github.com/NSIS-Dev/nsis
- g8oz 5mo ago
  I worked with both Installshield and NSIS and vastly prefered the latter, it just got the job done.
  - RajT88 5mo ago
    I did installer stuff for about ~10 years, mostly InstallShield, deep in the weeds with Windows Installer table editing and custom actions, and making the InstallScript engine do things it wasn't designed for. These days, I would personally use NSIS for small stuff. Wix installer for anything bigger/more enterprisey. Last I checked SharpDevelop's WYSIWYG editor was pretty decent for Wix dialogs.
  - cornholio 5mo ago
    I used to do the CodeWarrior installer for Freescale/NXP embedded product lines in the 2010s and InstallShield became completely unworkable as a tool for a massive dev tool. Even today, a 400MB+ installer is difficult, let alone in the age of mechanical HDDs. I had to choose between NSIS and Wix - and while native installer formats were clearly the future even back then, the performance and compression advantages of NSIS were so great that it was a clear choice. Solid LZMA was simply impossible to beat by any deflate/zlib/mszip oriented tool. The joy of the dev team was palpable, the new installer was about 60% smaller and installed in one third the time.
jsLavaGoat 5mo ago
Really whips the llama's ass.
jweir 5mo ago
Ah memory lane. I created the "speaker head" characters and lead the redesign of the WinAmp web site back in 2004. Good times. Through Odopod in San Francisco https://x.com/WebDesignMuseum/status/1700520818478854523 https://x.com/WebDesignMuseum/status/1700520818478854523
- foco_tubi 5mo ago
  As a teenager I spent a ton of time on this website, specifically the skins directory
  - mikestorrent 5mo ago
    winamp 2.77 for lyfe
gonesilent 5mo ago
I was part of this pre-aol and after. Good times! We all still hang out on an IRC server.
tolerance 5mo ago
This Frankel guy apparently had a hand in a lot of the tech that surrounded my youth. [0] Looking back and looking forward I understand why software developers became these larger-than-life-or-at-least-an-incrementally-past-the-norm personalities in the late 20th/early 21st century. And I understand why people (particularly in the software development industry) feel so deeply about how technology influenced/s their lives. The Information Age gave us direct involvement in the flow of information and the tide of culture. So many people...many of them barely adults, became involved in the social construction of the world around them. This probably isn't mind-blowing to most of you...but this is me coming to terms with this all in real time, right here, after silently writing a lot of users here as dorks detached from reality. I get it now. I'm surely simplifying some things too. Anyway. It's interesting how the level of agency and involvement that technology afforded society in the past has been straitened to accommodate corporations instead of to spite them. [0]: Note to self—Nullsoft is not the company who made Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
- corford 5mo ago
  To this day Justin maintains https://www.askjf.com/ https://www.askjf.com/ if you ever want to ask him something :)
kazinator 5mo ago
I use NSIS for the Windows installer of TXR. Does the job.
ruszki 5mo ago
Oh god, I miss the information density of old articles. Especially contrasting with these kinds of pieces. Today, this one would be at least 5 times as long without a good reason. This was a breeze to read.
- downbad_ 5mo ago
  Indeed!
Lapsa 5mo ago
/me also keylogged teacher's computer. shortly though as I quickly learned how shitty behavior that was
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

335 points by downbad_ 6mo ago

lofaszvanitt 5mo ago

Winamp still the best.

dramalama 5mo ago
it really does that llama thing
- blkhawk 5mo ago
  nice advertiser friendly self censoring there :P

downbad_ 6mo ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559415

unit149 5mo ago
[dead]

tombert 5mo ago

I am always confused when BigTechCos buy SmallCos and then unceremoniously kill them off fairly shortly after. I guess it's basically to cannibalize the source code?

htx80nerd 5mo ago
they want a popular thing, then that thing falls under the control of Big Business Meeting Thinking , and suffers the expected fate
okanat 5mo ago
Source code is only useful when you want the actual product, which is the rare case. Most of the time they want the patents, naming rights or just customers.
munk-a 5mo ago
Eh, I think that does happen but is much less likely then either acquihiring or killing a potential competitor.
lorecore 5mo ago
This was during the dotcom bubble and AOL/Time Warner need to optically look like they were doing something relevant with the internet to justify their valuation. It was pure messaging, with a bit of killing a threat on the side.
- ConceptJunkie 5mo ago
  Their whole business model at the time seemed to be "making dubious acquisitions".
  - giantrobot 5mo ago
    They lost money on every transaction but intended to make it up with volume.
arjie 5mo ago
It could just be a failed acquisition but an variant sometimes happens. OpenAI bought Statsig and then sold the Statsig brand and customer base to Amplitude.
esseph 5mo ago
The want the: developers, IP, customers, to kill some competition, or some combination.
Aurornis 5mo ago
The usual play is to acquire the customers and brand, with the team as a bonus. Except for rare unique products, the source code might not matter at all. They're after the business, brand, and customers. Having been in acquired SmallCos a couple times: There are always plans and justifications involving the products being acquired, but most don't survive impact with the acquiring company. People in a BigCo have their little fiefdoms established and everyone resists the sudden appearance of new developers and new code that weren't under their control. To be fair it goes both ways and the SmallCo developers who were previously in charge of everything don't like giving up control of parts of the system to the established teams and procedures in the BigCo.
rkagerer 5mo ago
It's because BigCo's tend toward decisions with dumb outcomes, while SmallCo's still benefit from the strategic direction of their founders. Although not a hard and fast rule, if you take a good look at where innovation occurs you'll often find the most successful products of big tech companies (after the initial one that made them big in the first place) came from acquisitions. Just look at Google's case: Android, YouTube, Maps, etc. Sometimes the aquisition doesn't pan out as planned, or they were just after the talent or to snuff out a potential competitor / snag its customers (like Postini), or it was a dumb move in the first place and the numbers finally bore that out. BigCo's don't usually have the same determined, long-term dedication to their acquisitions as the people who the founded them, so you also see premature shedding of ventures that could have a ton of potential over time.
flomo 5mo ago
Not complicated. Thing shows banner ads. Only makes money when expenses are zero.
b00ty4breakfast 5mo ago
sometimes it's an acquisition of some product and sometimes it's to explicitly to kill off the thing without concern for any product.
gopalv 5mo ago
> when BigTechCos buy SmallCos and then unceremoniously kill them off fairly shortly after There's many reasons, but in general incompetence, malice and small crumbs problem. I've done my small share of M&A DD work as an engineer, which was a lot of fun, but the results on my sanity and my outlook was bad. On one hand, you get to go talk to a core founder of a company and they're entirely open to you picking their brain on "Why this" / "Did it pay off?" on pure eV math they did in their heads. On the other, you see what happens after your recommendation and it is not within your control to change any of it. Incompetence is generally "Please rewrite this software by our practices" devops hell or "Let's look for better customers for this product, ignore the old ones" in the ICP land. Google and dodgeball comes to mind. Malice is more clear cut, where "Let's buy it and shut it down, so that we don't have a threat to our business" - I'm eagerly waiting to see what happens with Groq and Nvidia for example. AWS buying Groq would've been massively different. Classic case in point is Apple buying Fingerworks & shutting it down, but launching the iPhone. Lastly, there's the small crumbs problem (or as it has been famously said "Do not anthropomorphize the lawn mower"). A company can get bought and the product doesn't really add great value to the buyer, beyond getting a few people who really know the space. The small number of people them gets redistributed into a neat set of existing reqs where they just accelerate the existing company's products based on that knowledge or in general fail to surface back to make a significant ripple in the future. For example, I am wondering what will happen to Promptfoo after OpenAI.
Lammy 5mo ago
It's how The System kills something it wants dead without triggering Streisand Effect and creating a huge backlash. It punishes with success.

lorecore 5mo ago

Publishing Gnutella while being acquired by a greedy media company was such a baller move.

rickcarlino 5mo ago
The network still lives, even today. This is so underrated.
- dexwiz 5mo ago
  We had a private network on campus circa 2010. Streaming was up and coming but not huge. Gnutella was great on the gigabit intranet. You could download entire HD movies in minutes where conventional torrents may be hours.
  - rickcarlino 5mo ago
    Gnutella is a mild obsession for me. The way that the protocol was designed and also the way that it saw a mainstream adoption has always fascinated me. For anyone reading this thread who is curious, I wrote a functional client this year for fun: https://github.com/RickCarlino/gnutella-bun-client/ https://github.com/RickCarlino/gnutella-bun-client/
    - gonesilent 5mo ago
      It took a ton of work to keep the network clean. I did the gnutella.wego site back in the day. Gnutella was made when napster had 50 users and we all told him he was fcked. So gnutella was made to not use servers. Justin gave napster the code for song length and such to integrate with Napster.
      - rickcarlino 5mo ago
        Have you blogged about this or written it down? I would love to hear more about this piece of history and it seems that the history is slowly fading.

Fwirt 5mo ago

For anyone who was also curious what Justin Frankel got up to after the speculation at the end of the article, he founded Cockos Software and is the lead developer on the excellent REAPER DAW.

misnome 5mo ago
Oh, I had no idea. It's been a few years since I used it in anger but it was a very pleasant package to use, with an extremely friendly licensing scheme (purchasing a permanent license for <current.X> got you all releases up until version <current+1.max>)
- entropicdrifter 5mo ago
  Not to mention it's about as easy to use without a license as WinRAR, so you can trial it indefinitely and then pay the mere $60 for it when you're ready to release some music commercially
sbuttgereit 5mo ago
Easily one of the best values in commercial software if you have a need for what it does. I think I paid something ~$70 a couple of years ago. While there's a limitation on the number of updates you get based on release version, I'm still getting updates under the license a couple years on. All that and you get a genuinely professional level tool for much less than what similar software from competitors offer. I couldn't more highly recommend it.
- ethin 5mo ago
  I'm no musician but I paid for a Reaper license just because the software is so good and useful and the licensing scheme is so reasonable. Like, it's kind of hard to beat that.

SyneRyder 5mo ago

For those who might not know: > With Nullsoft gone and Frankel spending his time building a special-effects computer for his electric guitar... I don't know what happened to the Jesusonic he was building then, but Justin Frankel ended up creating Reaper, the cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux digital audio workstation that is a solid Pro Tools competitor in a mere 16 MB download: https://www.reaper.fm/ https://www.reaper.fm/ The installer for the whole DAW is smaller than most add-on VST effects. Some of my favorite albums have been recorded with Reaper, and obviously I'm a Reaper fan and use it too. Just like Winamp, you can pay for it, but if you really can't afford it, there's no time limit and it won't stop you from using it. Showing my age here, but if you have a copy of the Walnut Creek CD-ROMs with demoscene archives, there's a demo by "Nullsoft" from pre-Winamp days hiding somewhere in there as well. EDIT: Aww, fwirt beat me to it while I was typing! I guess I'll leave my comment here to add the Nullsoft demo mention. Found a link to his MSDOS demos here: https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1618 https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1618 EDIT TWO: You can run his Ademo demo on archive.org, type "ademo 1" at the C:\ prompt in the web based DOSbox to run: https://archive.org/details/demoscene_Ademo-Nullsoft https://archive.org/details/demoscene_Ademo-Nullsoft

AlyssaRowan 5mo ago
It's a straight line from Jesusonic to Reaper: Jesusonic JSFX script is in Reaper, and there's a whole selection of stock JS plugins that come with it and it's actually quite easy to program.
- kgwxd 5mo ago
  I always figured JSFX was javascript :) I've used reaper and plenty of jsfx plugins for a long time, just never bothered to look under the hood.
  - daniel_sim 5mo ago
    Whoa TIL. Jsfx feels way cooler now. Fwiw jsfx is easy fodder for llm’s if you need a quick utility. Mine was a midi channel filter

jackconsidine 5mo ago

Went down the Frenkel (Nullsoft founder) rabbit hole. Check out his forum where they've recently discussed AI bots scraping his forum [0]. Or his question submission page; he hasn't "left a reasonable question unanswered since 2009" [1] > nothing specific against cloudflare, but the point of the internet is that it's decentralized and I'd hate to contribute against that (though we already do somewhat, hosting on aws etc). anyway our homegrown solution is working nicely these days! for now - Justin January 2026 [0] https://www.1014.org/index.php?article=930#cl3 https://www.1014.org/index.php?article=930#cl3 [1] https://www.askjf.com/ https://www.askjf.com/

ecliptik 5mo ago

My favorite Nullsoft software that came out the end of this era was WASTE [1]. Peer-to-peer (back when P2P was all the rage), encrypted, decentralized private networks. Group of friends and I used it post-college as a way to share files and chat, and was much better than AIM or other instant messaging at the time. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE

gh02t 5mo ago
I always thought WASTE was so cool, but my family was pretty late get off of dialup to be able to actually use it. Sounds like it's still around in some form, do people actually use it nowadays?
samplatt 5mo ago
WASTE became popular in our area just as LANning was ending its heyday. Even now I think the whole course of technology could have been altered if WASTE was utilised in a "corporate VPN" fashion, instead of the rise of Juniper routers and Sharepoint spaces, we could have had much simpler secure work-collaboration protocols.
BLKNSLVR 5mo ago
WASTE introduced me to Thomas Pynchon. Thank you Justin!

ethagnawl 5mo ago

It's a shame some of those other names mentioned didn't wind up fading into obscurity.

DeathArrow 5mo ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBY52n7luM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBY52n7luM8

iluvcommunism 5mo ago

[dead]

zkmon 5mo ago

Winamp! My first experience of listening to serious music from computer.

bcraven 5mo ago
A community version survives to this day: https://getwacup.com/ https://getwacup.com/

mauricio 5mo ago

Looking back at this, has there been a maverick company like Nullsoft since then? It's sad, but AOL may have killed off the last one.

hunter2_ 5mo ago
Not a "company" but the SQLite story gives me maverick vibes. https://sqlite.org/consortium.html https://sqlite.org/consortium.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSVgeMoXJTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSVgeMoXJTs

Octoth0rpe 5mo ago

That year range definitely surprised me. In my generation I suspect many of us think of winamp as being just sort of always there, but of course it wasn't. When you add it up, it really only existed for <25% of the history of the web (taking 1996 -> 2026 as the time range, I think 1996 is defensible start for when the web becaome accessible to some portion of people in the first world). Hell, I probably have coworkers who were born after the dissolution of nullsoft (interns anyway).

sulam 5mo ago
I won’t nitpick too hard because the percentage doesn’t move much, but Netscape went public in ‘95 so it’s got to be before that. The minimum would be ‘91 (first website) but that’s too early. Super geeky but I will peg it at April 1 1995, which was the first release of Apache HTTP.
- Octoth0rpe 5mo ago
  The difference comes down to focusing on what we think of as the core infrastructure of the internet (the first modern browser, apache), versus _access_. I think there was a pretty big jump around 1996, 1997 in dialup subscribers. To get geekier though, we could actually peg it at late 1993/1994, the eternal september. I think I'll stick with 1996 though :)

p2detar 5mo ago

Additionally to Winamp, I guess what I will always remember Nullsoft with is also "NSIS - Nullsoft Scriptable Install System" [0]. In a previous job I sat down, read the docs and wrote a Windows-Installer for our product using this thing, since management didn't want to pay for InstallShield. What made quite an impression on me back then was the fact that the scripting language somewhat resembles assembly. [1] Also, NSIS had/has a tool called "NSIS Dialog Designer" which I used to design the Installer forms. It was quite the fun experience and I'm pleasantly surprised that NSIS is supported to this day [2]. 0 - https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Main_Page https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Main_Page 1 - https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Check_whether_your_application_is_running https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Check_whether_your_application_i... 2 - https://github.com/NSIS-Dev/nsis https://github.com/NSIS-Dev/nsis

g8oz 5mo ago
I worked with both Installshield and NSIS and vastly prefered the latter, it just got the job done.
- RajT88 5mo ago
  I did installer stuff for about ~10 years, mostly InstallShield, deep in the weeds with Windows Installer table editing and custom actions, and making the InstallScript engine do things it wasn't designed for. These days, I would personally use NSIS for small stuff. Wix installer for anything bigger/more enterprisey. Last I checked SharpDevelop's WYSIWYG editor was pretty decent for Wix dialogs.
- cornholio 5mo ago
  I used to do the CodeWarrior installer for Freescale/NXP embedded product lines in the 2010s and InstallShield became completely unworkable as a tool for a massive dev tool. Even today, a 400MB+ installer is difficult, let alone in the age of mechanical HDDs. I had to choose between NSIS and Wix - and while native installer formats were clearly the future even back then, the performance and compression advantages of NSIS were so great that it was a clear choice. Solid LZMA was simply impossible to beat by any deflate/zlib/mszip oriented tool. The joy of the dev team was palpable, the new installer was about 60% smaller and installed in one third the time.

jsLavaGoat 5mo ago

Really whips the llama's ass.

jweir 5mo ago

Ah memory lane. I created the "speaker head" characters and lead the redesign of the WinAmp web site back in 2004. Good times. Through Odopod in San Francisco https://x.com/WebDesignMuseum/status/1700520818478854523 https://x.com/WebDesignMuseum/status/1700520818478854523

foco_tubi 5mo ago
As a teenager I spent a ton of time on this website, specifically the skins directory
- mikestorrent 5mo ago
  winamp 2.77 for lyfe

gonesilent 5mo ago

I was part of this pre-aol and after. Good times! We all still hang out on an IRC server.

tolerance 5mo ago

This Frankel guy apparently had a hand in a lot of the tech that surrounded my youth. [0] Looking back and looking forward I understand why software developers became these larger-than-life-or-at-least-an-incrementally-past-the-norm personalities in the late 20th/early 21st century. And I understand why people (particularly in the software development industry) feel so deeply about how technology influenced/s their lives. The Information Age gave us direct involvement in the flow of information and the tide of culture. So many people...many of them barely adults, became involved in the social construction of the world around them. This probably isn't mind-blowing to most of you...but this is me coming to terms with this all in real time, right here, after silently writing a lot of users here as dorks detached from reality. I get it now. I'm surely simplifying some things too. Anyway. It's interesting how the level of agency and involvement that technology afforded society in the past has been straitened to accommodate corporations instead of to spite them. [0]: Note to self—Nullsoft is not the company who made Tony Hawk Pro Skater.

corford 5mo ago
To this day Justin maintains https://www.askjf.com/ https://www.askjf.com/ if you ever want to ask him something :)

kazinator 5mo ago

I use NSIS for the Windows installer of TXR. Does the job.

ruszki 5mo ago

Oh god, I miss the information density of old articles. Especially contrasting with these kinds of pieces. Today, this one would be at least 5 times as long without a good reason. This was a breeze to read.

downbad_ 5mo ago
Indeed!

Lapsa 5mo ago

/me also keylogged teacher's computer. shortly though as I quickly learned how shitty behavior that was

deleted 5mo ago

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