Nelson Ford - Public (software) Library

Public (software) Library

One of Nelson Ford's interest in the HAL-PC user group was swapping public domain and shareware software with other members. He eventually created a large, organized library of programs and his group made copies for other members for a disk fee.

In 1984, Nelson Ford wrote a column named The Public Library in Softalk-PC magazine. When people around the world were not able to get programs discussed in the column because they lacked economical access to bulletin board systems, they wrote to Nelson Ford asking for copies, which he also made for a disk fee. This service quickly snowballed into a full-time job, resulting in the creation of Public (software) Library (PsL) to provide the service. Nelson's wife, Kay Ford, ran the operation of PsL while Nelson ran the technical side.

Programmers who learned of the service sent their software to PsL to be added to the library, eventually at the rate of hundreds of programs a month. PsL hired technicians to test, review and write-up programs in PsL's monthly magazine and annual catalog which grew to well over 1000 pages.

Eventually, as the volume of software increased and CD-ROM drives in PCs became common, most of PsL's shareware distribution shifted to CD-ROMs where many hundreds of programs could be put on each monthly CD-ROM. During the boom years of shareware disk distribution, new vendors were popping up all the time. As the CD-ROM and the Internet took over, these disk vendors died out, thus leaving PsL the first (1980) and most likely the very last (1997) company to distribute shareware on diskettes.