What Happened to Shareware?

Shareware was one of the more honest arrangements in personal computing. Try the program. If you like it, pay for it. Sometimes payment removed a nag screen. Sometimes it sent you a registration code, a printed manual, extra levels, more features, or a disk in the mail. Sometimes it simply supported the person who wrote the thing. The details varied, but the bargain was easy to understand. That simplicity was part of its strength. Shareware fit the world of BBS systems, user groups, computer magazines, floppy swaps, FTP sites, and early web archives. A program could travel farther than its author ever could. Someone uploaded it to a board. Someone else downloaded it at 2400 baud, tried it, and passed it along. The distribution cost was low because users helped distribute it. The model was not new in spirit. People had been passing around public-domain and user-supported software before the term became common. What shareware did well was turn that circulation into a business path for…