[nostrademons]

In the even earlier days, software fit on floppy disks. And it absolutely could be downloaded over a modem - it took about 1 hour to download 1MB over a 2400 baud modem, not much longer than going to the store.

The problem was that you couldn't convince consumers to pay for software downloaded over a modem. (The infrastructure wasn't in place anyway - nobody was going to send their credit card number unencrypted to a random BBS sysop, and encryption was outlawed as a munition.) Many software firms in fact had huge problems with piracy over modem, and would build copy-protection into their software so you needed the original physical disk to run the software.

The idea that you could pay for a license key that unlocks software you download over the Internet only happened in the early 2000s, driven by combination of remaining restrictions on encryption being dropped, easy-to-integrate payment solutions for webpages coming to market, and widespread broadband adoption meaning that most consumers could easily download a big file.