ThinkBlog

Back in 1999, when I had practically no money anyway because I was a young student, I actually paid for WinZip. You know, those click-here-if-you-acknowledge-it’s-been-thousands-of-days-and-hundreds-of-thousands-of-archives and so forth. I actually paid for it because I felt a conviction that I should be honest and forthright about my dealings online. At the time I was knee-deep in researching C++, hacking culture, and what it really meant to “crack” a piece of software with serial number generators—but I wanted to make sure that it was kept strictly academic. So I paid whatever they were asking for a single user license.

This was supposed to guarantee free upgrades, right?

Wrong. Now, WinZip has changed their tune and will only allow you to use your old registration key for the new 10.0 version if you pay 50% of the brand-spanking-new license, both of which are ridiculously exorbitant for mere compression capabilities.

If you, like me, have been stung by this and don’t care to search for a WinZip crack and descend into the dark halls of computing’s arcane underbelly, you can still find WinZip 9.0 via FTP searches (forget Google, it’s uselessly pointing to version 10.0). See specifically here, for instance.

Back in 1999, when I had practically no money anyway because I was a young student, I actually paid for WinZip. You know, those click-here-if-you-acknowledge-it’s-been-thousands-of-days-and-hundreds-of-thousands-of-archives and so forth. I actually paid for it because I felt a conviction that I should be honest and forthright about my dealings online. At the time I was knee-deep in researching C++, hacking culture, and what it really meant to “crack” a piece of software with serial number generators—but I wanted to make sure that it was kept strictly academic. So I paid whatever they were asking for a single user license.

This was supposed to guarantee free upgrades, right?

Wrong. Now, WinZip has changed their tune and will only allow you to use your old registration key for the new 10.0 version if you pay 50% of the brand-spanking-new license, both of which are ridiculously exorbitant for mere compression capabilities.

If you, like me, have been stung by this and don’t care to search for a WinZip crack and descend into the dark halls of computing’s arcane underbelly, you can still find WinZip 9.0 via FTP searches (forget Google, it’s uselessly pointing to version 10.0). See specifically here, for instance.