[mikewarot]

Shareware - Back when we had the relative safety of hardware too dumb to stuff trojan horses in, and write protectable operating system disks, it was commonplace to have a vendor at your local user group with floppy diskettes full of new stuff to try out, for $2-3 per disk. There are thousands of disks with dozens of programs on each.

This was mobile code on a scale that is currently impossible. Once we get capability based security that protects the hardware and our data from things we run by default, it's possible it'll make a comeback, and there will be another wild explosion of creativity in programming.

[dave84]

I live in rural Ireland and I remember a family friend came back from the US and gave us a shareware CD-ROM with 1000 DOS games on it. This was the mid 90s before we had internet. We had just fitted a sound blaster card and a CD-Rom, I filled my dad’s 386 hard disk with them, it absolutely blew my mind. Shareware versions of Wolfenstein, Doom, Jetpack, all the Apogee games, all the classics.

[kakkan]

This is really cool, why did this die out?

[mikewarot]

It died out because there is no longer an easy method to sandbox things that is bulletproof.