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The whole history of shareware was badly neglected along my path into the industry, as if all those people set sail sometime in the 1990s and were never heard f
by kemitchell 2y ago
The whole history of shareware was badly neglected along my path into the industry, as if all those people set sail sometime in the 1990s and were never heard from again. In fact they continued in parallel, and still show very obvious influence in many niches of software. I think that was just hard to see while I was at uni.
I can strongly recommend Richard Moss' Shareware Heroes book for those interested in remedial reading, and not just for those devoted to games.
If there are any computer history grad students lurking, an integrative history of early software distribution models and industry orgs is still a big, gaping hole in the lit, as far as I know.
- ghaff 2y agoEssentially it was a parallel track in the BBS world. And it ended up dying/morphing into the sort of trial-ware etc. that the "true" shareware movement was largely against. The whole thing just sort of fizzled out as open source was becoming more prominent but, even as someone who was a part of it, it's not totally clear to me how that transition came about. With a few exceptions like Jason Scott's BBS documentary, the non-Unix/Internet history of early personal computing is not very well-covered at all.