What Is Shareware, and Why Was It So Popular in the 1990s?
What Is Shareware, and Why Was It So Popular in the 1990s? Benj Edwards It’s a crazy idea: Give your software away for free and hope that people like it enough to send you money. That was the idea behind shareware, a popular commercial software model in the 1980s and 1990s. Here’s what made it unique and successful at the time. The Origins of Shareware Historians usually credit three men with the creation of the shareware concept—to varying degrees. In 1982, Andrew Fluegelman created a telecommunications program called PC-Talk on his new IBM PC and began sharing it with his friends. Bef...
Source: howtogeek.com