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"Consumer software barely existed just 20 years ago."? I'd say not only it existed, but it existed more than today, if you exclude games. Eg, things that used to be for sale, and aren't really much of a thing anymore: various system tools like Norton Utilities, desktop toys that did junk like animated cursors in Windows 3.1, file compression tools, disk compression tools (Stacker), replacements for the Windows program manager, special purpose tools (PawSense is a funny one), memory managers (QEMM), PartitionMagic, Web browsers (Netscape was a packaged, paid product), mail clients (Eudora), possibly antiviruses (it's my impression that these days Windows Defender does the job) The likes of DOS and Windows 3.1 were barren of almost all functionality out of the box compared to a modern system. If you wanted to get something done legally, you had to buy a bunch of stuff. And then often times you'd want a bunch of misc tools on top. These days pretty much all of that has been absorbed into the OS, or has perfectly good free alternatives, or is functionally obsolete and not really a concept anymore. |