Essentially 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 lar

Essentially 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.