My experience was growing up in a semi-rural area in the U.S. in the 90s. At that time, DOS software was plentiful, but rarely purchased and usually shared over

My experience was growing up in a semi-rural area in the U.S. in the 90s. At that time, DOS software was plentiful, but rarely purchased and usually shared over floppies. The users tended to be geeks, and so they had some pretty sharp tools on hand. Whereas, in the age of Windows, especially 95 and on, copy protection became stronger, the user base expanded massively, demand shifted to office apps and games, and software started to grow too big to fit on a reasonable number of floppies. This transition happened while I was a young child, so perhaps it was just poor timing, but still it seemed like DOS was a sea of open possibility while Windows required a bank account which I didn't have.