When computers were corporate - great beasts that hogged whole rooms or even floors - software was corporate too. A data processing department bought or wrote the software that ran on the company mainframe, and the main choice open to the individual user was "take it or leave it".
Then as soon as personal computers shrank to the point of becoming personal the question of what software to run on "your" computer became a personal one. For the very early users of microcomputers it was more personal again - they had to write their own programs as there was almost no pre-written software available.
I needed a program to print mailing labels for a local church congregation. I had an Apple computer, so I wrote the program in Applesoft BASIC. I wanted more than just a label printing program, so I wrote a general purpose database program. I liked what I had produced so much that the program itself became a hobby - something that I continued to work on and improve in my spare time. - Jim Knopf, alias "Jim Button", alias "Father of Shareware" writing around 1981.
Not long after, companies began to market shrink-wrapped software packages to run on your shiny new home computer. But the programs that people had written for their own use didn't go away. In many cases they had shared the programs with friends, who had shared them again, who had passed them on further. Among the softwarehungry owners of those amazing new machines a useful program was well worth sharing.
I used the database program to keep track of its own public - its growing number of devotees. But problems soon developed. It became increasingly expensive and time-consuming to notify the users when fixes or improvements became available. How could I identify which of the users were serious ones - those that desired and required enhancements? How could I afford to send mailings to notify them of the availability of improvements? - Jim Button
Button decided to put a message in his program, asking users for a $10 donation to cover his costs if they wanted to join his mailing list, and encouraging them to share the program with others. One user phoned him about a similar request in another program: PC-Talk, written by Andrew Fluegelman. Button contacted Fluegelman and they cooperated in a unique "marketing experiment" - giving away their work with a request that users make a donation if they found the programs useful. In the early 1980s modems were slow, rare and pricey. So distribution was on disk and by post (therefore slow and expensive). But this didn't stop the shareware experiment from taking off.
I could not have predicted what would happen next. My wife said that I was "a foolish old man" if I thought that even one person would voluntarily send me money for the program. I was more optimistic. I suspected that enough voluntary payments would come to help pay for expansions to my personal computer hobby - perhaps several hundred dollars. Maybe even a thousand dollars (in my wildest dreams!) But my tiny post office box was too small to receive the responses from a wildly enthusiastic public.
Button and Fluegelman caught the mood of the moment. At a time when commercial programs included cumbersome anti-copying measures, theirs encouraged users to copy. Instead of paying to find out what a program could do, this was try-before-you-buy software, asking for a small contribution if it was found useful.
With the rise of BBSes (electronic bulletin boards), shareware libraries and computer clubs, shareware programs had a friendly environment to replicate themselves rapidly and cheaply. Users and registration payments grew geometrically.
By the beginning of the 1990s Buttonware had 35 staff and an income of $4.5 million a year. Closer to home, Mike Brady of Trinity College Dublin has just released Irish Accessories 8 as "postcardware". He asks those who use it to send him a postcard instead of payment. This shareware utility gives easy access to Irish-language characters under the latest Macintosh operating system. He is also the author of Open Prolog, a freeware programming language specially suited to computational linguistics. Brady took up shareware writing "as part of an academic's job of doing research-like things and distributing the results", to put something back into the freewware/shareware community and "to get postcards".
Fiachra O Marcaigh is at: fomarcaigh@irish-times.ie
For more information, see www.halcyon.com/knopf/authors .htm
Irish Accessories 8 is at yperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/HyperArchive/HyperArchive.html