☞ The Nature of Shareware - by Samuel Arbesman
During my Macintosh-infused youth, I quickly became aware of one category of computer programs: shareware. Shareware is not something that we really think about any longer, but for a time—perhaps its heyday was the Nineteen Nineties—it was a major route for distributing software.
Shareware was given away by its creators, accompanied by messages that were increasingly frequent or hysterical encouraging the user to send a check to the creator. The shareware program was often limited in some way to further incentivize payment: you would only receive the ability to unlock its full featured abilities (or additional levels of a game) after you paid.
One particularly inspired shareware mechanism that I remember from my childhood was something included in versions of a game called Escape Velocity. Published by Ambrosia Software, Escape Velocity was a role-playing outer space arcade game, where you explored your corner of the galaxy in a spacecraft and accrued wealth and experience. However, after thirty days of being able to play the game at one’s ease, an enemy vessel named “ Cap’n Hector”—which had simply harassed you with messages to pay for the game—would attack you. And you could not win. Inevitable death by Hector’s hand was your fate. The only solution? Pay up, or stop playing this game.
Shrink-wrapped software this was not. There were no boxes or printed manuals to accompany these programs, unlike much of the software at the time where you went to a store and paid for it. There weren’t professional customer service numbers. You downloaded these programs off websites or message boards or AOL or Compuserve. And yet, shareware ended up as a large part of the software ecosystem. On the Macintosh at least, it wasn’t even just games that were shareware. From what I remember, there were shareware utilities and productivity tools, programs of all types.
