Distribution

17-Bit Software was a Wakefield mail-order library of Amiga software, demos, music and animations. Its numbered disks connected scene productions with magazine readers and helped bring future Team17 collaborators together.

A community term, from the late 1990s, for old commercial software that is no longer sold or supported and that enthusiasts share online. It names a real preservation problem, but it is not a legal category: copyright does not lapse when a publisher stops selling or goes out of business.

In 1984 new British publishers began selling cassette games for £1.99 to £2.95, about a third of the usual price, through newsagents, garages and supermarkets. Budget labels such as Mastertronic, Firebird Silver and Code Masters lived on volume, and from the late 1980s the big publishers used budget labels of their own to sell their old full-price games again.

From the mid-1980s British computer magazines stuck cassettes to their covers, first with demos and then with whole games. By 1991 the Spectrum magazines were competing on how many games each tape held, and the publishers' trade body, ELSPA, persuaded them and the Amiga magazines to cut back. The tapes lasted until the last 8-bit magazines closed in 1995, and the disks and CDs on 16-bit and PC magazines carried the idea on.

Selling or lending software down a wire instead of in a box. Games came over American cable television from 1980 and down telephone lines and through British teletext in 1983; Nintendo's Disk Writer kiosks, the Sega Channel and Satellaview followed. Valve's Steam, out of testing in 2003, was not the first but became the service that made downloading the normal way to buy PC games.

Shareware games of the early 1990s came in episodes, but players could buy them all at once. Episodic gaming meant releasing the instalments over months, like a television series. Capcom tried it on the Dreamcast in 2000; Valve, Ritual and Telltale took it up in 2005–06; and Telltale's The Walking Dead (2012) and Dontnod's Life is Strange (2015) made it work for story games. Schedules slipped, series were left unfinished, and Valve abandoned its own episodes after two.

Fred Fish’s Amiga Freely Redistributable Library distributed programs, demos and source code on numbered disks. Its contents files recorded credits, versions and practical details, while individual works retained their own distribution terms.

Licenseware, or licenceware, was software sold through public domain libraries at a pound or two above the price of a PD disk, with the extra passed back to the author as a royalty. It began on the Atari ST around 1989, grew large on the Amiga through AMOS and labels such as F1 Licenceware, and was not for copying.

From 1988 British magazines for the Amiga and Atari ST came with a floppy disk on the cover, full of demos, utilities, public-domain programs and, for a few months in 1991, whole commercial games, until the publishers' trade body stopped that. The disks were compiled and duplicated by outside firms, bought original programs from readers, and gave way to CDs in the mid-1990s and DVDs after that.

Before cheap modems, home computer owners swapped software by post. The small ads in magazines worked as the directory: 'send your list for mine', from Britain, Portugal, Norway, Uruguay and Australia. Most of what moved was copied games, and the cracking and demo scenes ran their own postal networks of 'swappers', some of which lasted into the late 1990s.

Free software passed between home computer owners from the hobby's first years: through user-group libraries in the late 1970s, mail-order disk libraries such as PC-SIG and the Fred Fish collection in the 1980s, and the British Amiga PD libraries of the early 1990s. 'PD' was used loosely for anything free to copy, most of it still under its author's copyright. The libraries charged for copying and postage, not for the programs, and one of them, Wakefield's 17-Bit Software, turned into Team17.

Software that anyone could copy and try, with payment asked from those who kept using it. Andrew Fluegelman's PC-Talk set the pattern in 1982 under the name 'freeware'; PC-Write paid its users a commission to spread it; Scott Miller's Apogee turned it into a way of selling games, giving away the first part and selling the rest, and id Software used the same model to publish Doom itself.

Home computer software came on ordinary cassettes and floppy disks, and copying it took a twin-deck tape recorder or a copy program. Publishers answered with copy protection, trade bodies, advertising campaigns and new laws, and put ever larger figures on their losses; organised cracking groups turned copying into a competitive underground scene.

Valve built Steam to update Counter-Strike and announced it in 2002; it came out of testing in September 2003. Half-Life 2 made it compulsory in 2004, to loud complaint. From 2005 it sold other studios' games, and small developers such as Introversion sold more there in weeks than in shops and from its own website. Greenlight and then Steam Direct opened it to almost anyone, and Valve's own hardware, from Steam Machines to the Steam Deck, grew out of it.

From the 1970s into the 1990s, magazines and books printed complete programs as listings for readers to type into their own computers. Readers sent their own in for a fee, magazines invented checksum programs to catch typing mistakes, and some readers went on to write games professionally. Cover tapes and disks took over from the mid-1980s, though a few magazines still printed listings in the mid-1990s.