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The article recounts id Software's experiment with selling encrypted games on the Quake Shareware CD-ROM in the 1990s, which was quickly hacked, leading to a disastrous retail failure.
This article tells the story of Eugene Roshal, the Russian programmer behind WinRAR, including his programming background in the Soviet era, his self-developed compression algorithm in 1993, the launch of WinRAR in 1995, and the brilliant commercial strategy behind the 40-day trial design: no feature limitation, only pop-up reminders, allowing free personal use to build an ecosystem, forcing companies to purchase bulk licenses, while opening the decompression code but keeping the compression algorithm closed to maintain market barriers.