Shaun Green looks at how shared software has grown and changed over time.
The story of shareware runs parallel to the tale of the modern PC, from 1980s inception through to the present day. It may be surprising to think that something as innocuous as a method of distributing software can have had such significant roots and have left such a deep impression on the landscape of computing.
Shareware was born of humble origins all the way back in 1982 -just one year after the arrival on the market of the first IBM PCs, the great granddaddies of most modern personal computers. And in one of those odd coincidences that crop up again and again throughout history, shareware was invented almost simultaneously by two men - both Americans and both software developers.
Jim Knopf (also known as Jim Button) was an IBM employee who occasionally wrote software on the side. One program he wrote for his local church congregation proved so popular that he left IBM and formed his own company, Buttonware. This program, a flat-file database program called Easy-File, became his first commercial release. Looking back, it is admittedly not the most fascinating piece of software, but it filled a niche.
Before he had left IBM, Knopf had elected to release Easy-File as "user supported software", asking only that the cost of the diskettes it was distributed on be covered. The program spread rapidly through PC user groups (the means by which enthusiasts socialised and discussed computing in the years before the internet), and after a while Knopf began requesting that those who used and liked his software send in donations. The response was overwhelming and exceeded his IBM salary by ten to one. It was at this point that Knopf realised he was on to something.
Around the same time, a Californian named Andrew Fluegelman was working on a program called PC-Talk. Fluegelman, born in 1943, had historically worked as a small publisher and an attorney, but after attending a computer expo in the late 1970s, he purchased his first computer. He was one of the first in San Francisco to receive a new IBM PC and promptly set to work writing his own programs.
Fluegelman released PC-Talk, a piece of communication software, which like Easy-File enjoyed substantial success. Fluegelman's distribution model was dubbed 'freeware', and like Knopf he asked for little more than the cost of disks to be covered. He suggested that users who found his software useful might wish to send him a $25 donation, however, and also found that many people chose to do so.
Once Knopf and Fluegelman noticed each other's software offerings and recognised that each was using the same model, they got in touch and discussed how to work together. Knopf renamed Easy-File PC-File so that their flagship software offerings sounded similar, they brought their suggested donation figures into line, and they promoted one another as well. They continued to distribute their software at cost, living off the donations that generous or grateful users provided, and used that income to fund further development.
Fluegelman had already trademarked the name 'freeware', hoping that he could make money from it if it took off but found that the word wasn't widely applicable enough. Knopf's 'user supported software' moniker was a bit of a mouthful, so the pair arranged a competition via a magazine to decide a new name for their distribution model. The winner was, of course, 'shareware'.
Soon after this, Knopf and Fluegelman discovered there was already a third developer, Bob Wallace, using the term 'shareware' to promote his word processing software, PC-Write. The three linked up and, over time, the popularity of 'shareware' as both a model and a label was cemented.
Knopf and Wallace went on to enjoy continuing success with their shareware businesses, but Fluegelman made an unfortunate mistake. He elected to share the source code for PC-Talk (not inventing the open source model, incidentally, for the concept had been around for a long time and that label wasn't agreed on until the late 90s), and his business collapsed when users began to distribute their own versions, cutting away at his market share and income.
Building Blocks
Just why did shareware turn out to be a success? Looking back, it's easy to see the fertile ground in which shareware took root. Those early innovators - Knopf, Fluegelman and Wallace - recognised it. The IBM PC was a revolutionary new machine, and they gambled on its imminent popularity. It was not long before they were proven right.
Home PC ownership was on the rise, and more and more computer clubs were springing up. These were ideal environments in which to share diskettes containing software, and the new shareware model was perfect for such an environment. Awareness of shareware programs spread virally and extremely rapidly as a result.
Shareware was also given an immense boost once the new computing magazines got involved. Here was an exciting and innovative method of distributing software - one that was extremely popular among users, was making its creators huge amounts of money and that was competing successfully with larger, established corporate software developers.
It's also important to remember that with the IBM PC being such a youthful platform, relatively little software was available. For example, PC-File had only a few competitors, all of which had clunky copy protection implemented. Such programs also had to be purchased before they were tried; they were very expensive, and they were primarily sold via retail stores.
By comparison, the young turks of shareware actively encouraged copying their software, allowed it to be used as much as was desired without payment, asked only for a comparatively negligible sum of money and finally the software could be acquired via friends, colleagues or simply sending a disk to its authors.
The computing press was extremely enthusiastic about the shareware model, and the free publicity they gave Knopf, Fluegelman and Wallace both boosted their success and that of the model itself. It was soon clear that shareware was here to stay.
Play The Game
Despite the increasing popularity of the IBM PC in American homes and the fact that the Amiga and Atari ST never really took off in the States, there were relatively few games available for the PC through much of the 1980s and even the early 1990s. Those titles that were available occupied specific niches: golf or flight simulations, edutainment titles like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, or early point and click adventure games with geeky senses of humour such as Sierra's Space Quest series.
The accepted wisdom was that although an audience for games on the PC did exist, manufacturing and distributing games was inherently expensive and risky. Before game demos existed, before dedicated magazines or websites existed to distribute them, gamers were leery of spending a substantial chunk of money on an unproven title, concept or developer.
Once again the shareware model proved to be a game-changer (pun entirely intended).
The story of commercial shareware games began in 1987, a full five years after PC-File and PC-Talk began a quiet revolution. Although shareware games made by hobbyists had already been distributed over the preceding years, the model had yet to make its mark in the business of commercial games. Then Apogee Software (better remembered today as 3D Realms, the company behind the infamous Duke Nukem 3D) elected to try out the model. Like Knopf and Fluegelman, they initially distributed entire games for free, requesting payment if users liked the game. With payment came technical support from Apogee and advice where players struggled with a game.
Sadly this variant of the shareware model did not prove as successful for Apogee. Early interactive fiction stories like Supernova and Beyond the Titanic are still remembered today among enthusiasts, but at the time failed to turn much of a profit. Apogee went back to the drawing board, and later the same year it began distributing Kingdom of Kroz, an ASCII-art dungeon crawler, again for free. However, on reaching the end of what came to be known as Kroz: Episode 1, players were presented with a screen informing them that the remaining episodes could be purchased by calling a number and having them shipped out. This time the model proved more successful, as players who enjoyed the game happily stumped up the cash for more of the same. Apogee repeated its experiment with further games over the next few years.
Around the same time, the ingenuity of games developers was increasing, with particular thanks to a small studio known as iD Software. iD first impressed gamers in 1990 with Commander Keen, a platformer that featured clever visual features like parallax scrolling, previously seen only on Nintendo and Sega's home consoles, and again in 1992 with Wolfenstein 3D, one of the earliest first-person shooters.
Other companies also began to profit from the shareware model, notably including Epic Megagames. Epic was at the time made up of just a few guys in a basement ('Megagames' was intended to make it sound like a larger company than it actually was), but today it's a multi-million dollar business behind the Unreal Engine, the most popular engine in game development. However, it wasn't until 1993 that shareware games experienced their first blockbuster mega-hit: iD Software's Doom.
In many ways, Doom benefited greatly by appearing at a crossroads moment. Its creator, iD, had the money and time it needed to make the game it wanted, thanks to the success of Wolfenstein 3D. Home PCs were beginning to become more and more widespread, and the power of these machines was also increasing, meaning flashier visuals and sound driven by more complex game engines were feasible. Perhaps most importantly, the internet was beginning to become more popular among owners of PCs, having been opened to the public a few years earlier in 1991.
The impact of Doom on gaming is difficult to overstate. Its palpable atmosphere and first-person perspective made for an immersive experience like few others; even today, players who look past its dated sprite graphics can find a heartracing experience within. It was also one of the first games to be openly moddable, meaning enthusiastic fans could experiment with creating their own levels or tinkering with other aspects of the game. And of course, the distribution of the game's entire first episode as shareware - with the remaining two episodes available for a relatively low price - meant that it was a runaway success, whether shared via the internet or via traditional disk-swapping.
Time For Change
As the 1990s wore on, the shareware model began to fall out of favour in the games industry. Shareware had helped make PC gaming a success, but as competition and budgets increased, it became increasingly less popular. The death knell rang in 1996, when iD released Quake, the spiritual successor to Doom, and Apogee (now 3D Realms) released Duke Nukem 3D. Both titles were made available via the episodic shareware model, but boxed retail copies had already hit the shelves. The CD-ROM also played a part in ending shareware games, as multimedia content outstripped the capacity of the stalwart and low-cost floppy disk.
PC gaming was no longer as risky a business, and considering the amount of money it took to develop games and the technology underpinning them, the idea of giving a third of a game away for free became increasingly less popular among developers. At this point, specialist PC gaming magazines and websites had also been around for several years, and these proved ideal platforms via which to distribute promotional demos. These demos were often very limited in scope or duration, offering players a much smaller taste of what the full product was like.
Shareware has never gone away, however, and remains a popular means of both distributing and promoting software. It has changed over the years: as commercial web hosting solutions began to appear, developers started setting up their own websites and offering direct downloads. As the risk of malware grew, developers and software companies began to discourage users from distributing programs themselves and instead suggested they share a link to the developer's own website.
Further adjustments to the shareware model have occurred as the internet's userbase has changed. In the 1980s, it was a reasonable expectation that the relatively small number of PC users - often with a background in software or computing themselves - would understand the work that went into creating software and would therefore be happy to pay for something they used regularly. This is less true of a broader mass audience - particularly one that is aware that there are a hundred different applications that purport to address the same need.
Despite this, many pieces of software still rely on donations. These are often niche pieces of software such as Sonar3, a manuscript tracking application, or many of the plug-ins used with the WordPress website platform. Other software uses variants on the same model. Take, for example, the WinRAR archiving software, which offers a fully featured 40-day trial, or the REAPER audio recording and editing software, which offers an unlimited evaluation licence behind a simple nag screen that must be viewed for five seconds.
Shareware Today
The future of shareware is a debatable one. Like many innovations that have left a huge impression on fast-growing areas of business, technology and culture, it has mutated beyond its original vision. It seems unlikely that the word will be going anywhere any time soon, but as you can see elsewhere on this page (see 'Criticism Of Shareware'), the word has come to have a fairly broad meaning.
The concepts behind shareware - try before you buy, encouraging marketing via word of mouth and trusting users to make up their own minds - continue to crop up throughout the internet. It is likely they always will.
One surprising development is the way that 'buy before you try' seems to be making a comeback in gaming - the same industry that largely turned its back on shareware in the late 1990s. Today, websites like Kickstarter allow users to fund the development of games that often do not yet exist, while services like Steam Early Access allow players to buy a game before it's finished and play the alpha or beta versions. This ostensibly helps developers fund ongoing development and crowd-source user feedback and bug identification.
In many ways, this looks like the opposite of the classic shareware model; however, in the close relationship between user and developer, you can still see the trust and engagement that turned shareware from an idea into something that came to shape software distribution.