In January 1991 a mail-order firm in Peterlee, County Durham, took a page in Amiga Format to sell software it had not written and did not charge for. Vally PD listed demos, music, games, utilities and slideshows, and said they were “only a small selection of many hundreds of titles we have in stock”. Disk 001 was The Juggler, the ray-traced animation that had shown off the Amiga’s graphics in 1986. A catalogue disk cost 75p including postage. Orders of ten disks or more came with a free disk and free post, and every order went into a draw for 25 disks of the winner’s choice. The programs themselves were free. Vally was selling the copying, the postage and the knowledge of what was out there.
That was how public domain software, or PD, reached most home computer owners who had no modem. It started long before the Amiga, among the hobbyists and user groups of the 1970s, and at its height in Britain in the early 1990s it helped start at least one games company.
What “public domain” meant
Strictly, a program in the public domain belongs to nobody. Its author has given up the copyright, and anyone may copy it, change it or sell it. Most “PD” was nothing of the kind. In 1995 Amiga Format’s John Kennedy explained that the term was “normally used as a catch-all” for free programs, but that “a great deal of software which you might take to be PD isn’t PD at all”. The author usually kept the copyright and allowed copying on conditions: no selling for profit beyond the cost of disks and postage, and no changes without permission. The more accurate term, Kennedy wrote, was “freely distributable”.
Two other schemes travelled through the same libraries. Shareware could be copied freely, but the author asked for payment from people who kept using it. Licenseware was only sold through registered libraries, which paid the author a royalty on every copy. With licenseware, Kennedy wrote, “we have left the PD world and entered into the realm of low-cost commercial distribution”.
User groups and the first libraries
The idea came with the first home computers. In December 1975 an advertisement for the Altair 8800 in BYTE told buyers that “literally hundreds of thousands of BASIC programs have been written and are in the public domain”. By March 1978 Digital Research was advertising its CP/M operating system with a user group that had “been active for over a year, where you can obtain quality software available at a very low cost and add your own programs to a community of enthusiastic users”.
InfoWorld’s Essential Guide to Atari Computers described in 1984 how a user group library worked. Some groups lent the master copy at one month’s meeting for members to copy at home and return at the next. Most did the copying themselves, fearing the loss of the master, and sold each copy “for the cost of the disk or tape, plus a slight charge to support the service”. Why did authors give their work away? “Some do it just for the joy of creating software and watching it being used,” the guide said. Others had programs that were good but could not succeed commercially, which is why the libraries were full of programming utilities. The guide also warned group librarians to screen out pirated commercial programs that turned up among the free ones.
Some of the most important programs of the era circulated this way. The same guide explained that XMODEM, the most common error-checking method for sending programs by modem, was “named after a public-domain program written by Ward Christensen”. Schools had their own exchanges: in 1982 COMPUTE! reviewed Roadtrip, a driving simulation written as a class project at the University of Minnesota, which was available with two other public domain programs for $10 from Softswap, run by the San Mateo County Office of Education in California.
Mail-order libraries
As disk drives spread, libraries began selling by post to anyone. In November 1984 Computer Language recommended the PC Software Interest Group, PC-SIG, as a source of IBM PC public domain software. Its catalogue was “almost at 200 disks” at $6.00 each, plus postage. PC-SIG carried “true public domain software” alongside “the newer ‘user-supported program’ concept”, in which authors hoped for a donation of $10 to $30 from users who liked their programs. That was shareware under another name.
The Amiga had the largest collection. Fred Fish, “a good and active friend of the Amiga” in Amazing Computing’s words, gathered freely distributable programs onto numbered disks. The Juggler was on Fish disks 47 and 57. By 1989 Commodore Magazine’s columnist was reviewing Fish disks 173 to 194 in a single month, and by 1995 dealers were advertising Fish disks 1 to 1000. Amazing Computing’s listings marked each program to show whether its source code was on the disk, so that readers could learn from it as well as use it.
The British PD boom
In Britain, Amiga PD became a business of its own at the start of the 1990s. The January 1991 issue of Amiga Format carried pages of library advertisements. Disks cost from 99p to a few pounds each. Most libraries sold a catalogue disk (Vally charged 75p, others £1) or sent one free with orders. Their adverts sold disks by describing what was on them, and named the creators readers had come to look for: “Tobias Richter’s Star Trek” in one list, “Fab anim by Mr Richter” in Vally’s. Tobias Richter’s Star Trek set, two disks of pictures, animation and music, turned up in list after list.
A library could launch a career. The musician Allister Brimble told Amiga Format in 1997 that he had written a few tunes and sent them to “a PD company called 17-bit Software. They really liked what I did and published the tunes on one of their first disks.” 17-Bit Software, run from Wakefield by the computer shop owner Michael Robinson, decided in 1990 to make games as well as distribute them, and joined forces with the Swedish programmers of Team 7 to form Team17. “When 17-bit Software set up Team 17,” Brimble said, “I was obviously first in line to create the music for their games, such as Alien Breed, Project-X.”
After the libraries
Modems and the internet took over the libraries’ job. From 1992 the Aminet archive gathered the Amiga’s freely distributable software in one place online, and sold it on CD-ROM to Amiga owners without a connection. The Aminet Set 1 CDs of 1995 included the Fred Fish disks. By then Kennedy’s advice to Amiga Format readers with a program to share was to upload it to Aminet and “watch it pop up all over the place”, and to send disks to the libraries only if they could not get online.
Sources
- MITS advertisement for the Altair 8800, BYTE issue 4, December 1975: “hundreds of thousands of BASIC programs”.
- Digital Research advertisement for CP/M, BYTE vol. 3 no. 3, March 1978, pp. 116–117: the CP/M user group.
- Glenn Kleiman, “Computer Simulations: Learning Through Exploration, Discovery, And Play”, COMPUTE! issue 29, October 1982, p. 112: Roadtrip and Softswap.
- Scott Mace and the editors of InfoWorld, InfoWorld’s Essential Guide to Atari Computers (Harper & Row/InfoWorld, 1984): user group libraries and why authors give programs away (the users’ groups section), XMODEM and Ward Christensen (the telecommunications section), and the glossary.
- Computer Language issue 3, November 1984: column on IBM PC public domain software (PC-SIG, its prices and user-supported programs).
- Amazing Computing vol. 4 no. 9, September 1989: Fred Fish disk listings.
- Commodore Magazine vol. 10 no. 9, September 1989: Amiga public domain column (Fish disks 173 to 194).
- AmigaWorld vol. 11 no. 4, April 1995: dealer advertisements (Fish disks 1 to 1000).
- Amiga Format issue 18, January 1991: PD library advertisements, including Vally PD, p. 185 (The Juggler, catalogue disk, discounts and prize draw), and others (prices per disk, catalogue disks, Tobias Richter).
- Amiga Shopper issue 4, August 1991: PD reviews (Tobias Richter’s two-disk Star Trek set).
- Amiga Format issue 26, September 1991: PD library advertisements (catalogue disks at £1, 70p and free).
- John Kennedy, feature on PD software, Amiga Format issue 76, October 1995: what PD means, freely distributable software, licenseware, and releasing your own program.
- Interview with Allister Brimble, Amiga Format issue 103, November 1997: 17-Bit Software and Team17.