Shareware - History

History

In 1982, Andrew Fluegelman created a program for the IBM PC called PC-Talk, a telecommunications program, he used the term freeware. About the same time, Jim "Button" Knopf released PC-File, a database program, calling it user-supported software. Not much later, Bob Wallace produced PC-Write, a word processor, and called it shareware. Appearing in an episode of Horizon titled Psychedelic Science originally broadcast 5 April 1998, Bob Wallace said the idea for shareware came to him "to some extent as a result of my psychedelic experience".

In 1984, Softalk-PC magazine had a column, The Public Library, about such software. Public domain is a misnomer for shareware, and Freeware was trademarked by Fluegelman and could not be used legally by others, and User-Supported Software was too cumbersome. So columnist Nelson Ford had a contest to come up with a better name.

The most popular name submitted was Shareware, which was being used by Wallace. However, Wallace acknowledged that he got the term from an InfoWorld magazine column by that name in the 1970s, and that he considered the name to be generic, so its use became established over freeware and user-supported software.

Fluegelman, Knopf, and Wallace clearly established shareware as a viable software marketing method. Via the shareware model, Button, Fluegelman and Wallace became millionaires.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, shareware software was widely distributed over bulletin board systems globally and on diskettes (and, subsequently, CD-ROMs) by commercial shareware distributors who produced catalogs describing thousands of public domain and shareware programs. One such distributor, Public Software Library (PSL), began an order-taking service for programmers who otherwise had no means of accepting credit card orders.

As Internet use grew, users turned to downloading shareware programs from FTP or web sites without paying long-distance charges or disk fees. This spelled the end of bulletin board systems and shareware disk distributors. At first, disk space on a server was hard to come by, so networks of mirror sites like Info-Mac, containing large shareware libraries were developed, accessible via the web or ftp. Later, the authors of programs developed their own sites where the public could learn about their programs and download the latest versions, and even pay for the software online. This erased one of the chief distinctions of shareware, as it was now most often downloaded from a central "official" location instead of being shared samizdat-style by its users.

The Internet also made it easier to locate niche software, as well as the best and most popular general software. During the early 2000s, and with the increasing popularity of Web 2.0, new ways to filter the software became available. Major download sites began to rank titles based on quality, feedback, and downloads. Popular software was sorted to the top of the list. Blogs and online forums further enabled individuals to spread news about titles they like. With this pruning in place, consumers can more easily find quality shareware products while still preserving the ability to find obscure and niche software.