In 1983 Andrew Fluegelman was giving his software away and asking people to copy it for their friends. Every copy opened with a notice asking for $25 if you liked the program. A book on copy protection written that year found the idea hard to take seriously: he relied, it said, “on the good faith he has created by giving away the program and on the guilt feelings he can inspire with the notice at the start of the program”. Fluegelman claimed that about two-thirds of the people who sent him a blank disk for a copy paid, and about 15% of those who got one second-hand. The same page recorded that “many experienced software producers are skeptical of Fluegelman’s claims and believe the concept has no future”.
The concept became shareware. It carried word processors, databases and communications programs from user to user through the 1980s, and by the early 1990s it was the way small companies such as Apogee, id Software and Epic MegaGames sold their games.
Freeware, then shareware
Fluegelman wrote PC-Talk, a communications program for the IBM PC, in 1982. According to Harry Henderson’s Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, he took the idea from public radio and television, which asked listeners and viewers to pay for a service they could receive free. He called his method “freeware”. George Morrison’s Atari Software Protection Techniques (1983) quoted his three principles:
- “The value and utility of software is best assessed by the user on his/her own system.”
- “The creation of independent personal computer software can and should be supported by the computing community.”
- “Copying and networking programs should be encouraged, rather than restricted.”
Morrison’s legal advice described the model that shareware kept: the author should still copyright the program “to prevent others from selling it”, then license people to use and copy it, “provided that they do not change the notice asking for contributions”. Shareware was never a gift to the public domain.
Others followed. In March 1984 Family Computing described Jim Button’s PC-File database as “another freeware package”, and reported that PC-Talk users were being asked for a “donation” of $20 to $50. The copyright holders had asked user groups not to hand these programs out, because the groups charged for copying, and the authors wanted them to travel as free samples. Henderson records that Fluegelman had trademarked “freeware”, so the others adopted another name for the same idea: shareware. By February 1985 COMPUTE! was still explaining the term, “shareware—or user-supported software, as it is also known”, and was clear that it was “not just an exercise in altruism. Rather, it is a marketing approach.”
PC-Write paid you to copy it
That COMPUTE! article reviewed PC-Write, a word processor published by Quicksoft. Its author, Bob Wallace, had worked at Microsoft, where he wrote much of the MS-Pascal compiler. Comparable word processors cost $400 or more. PC-Write came from a friend, a user group, a bulletin board, or from Quicksoft for $10 to cover the disk and postage. Registering cost $75 and brought a bound manual, telephone support, the next major update and the program’s Pascal and machine language source code.
It also brought a personal registration number, and that number travelled:
Whenever you share your personalized copy of PC-Write with someone, their copy will bear your registration number. If that person subsequently registers PC-Write, Quicksoft mails you a $25 commission. There’s no limit to the number of commissions you can earn.
The reviewer, Sheldon Leemon, called it “the software equivalent of a (legal) chain letter”. He also passed on Wallace’s own view: to make money from voluntary payments, a program “must be very good indeed”.
Apogee sells the rest of the trilogy
Games came later, and changed the offer. Scott Miller, a programmer in Garland, Texas, wrote a series of games called Kroz, “Zork backward”, drawn in the IBM PC’s text characters. In October 1990 Orson Scott Card explained in COMPUTE! how Miller sold them. He wrote three games at once, a trilogy, and released one as shareware. That game was complete: “If you’re content with just one Kroz game, you never have to pay.” But anyone who wanted the other two had to buy them from Miller, at $20 a trilogy, including hint books and maps. His marketing department, Card wrote, “is huge but costs him nothing”. Apogee Software “sounds like a corporation until you realize that it consists entirely of Scott Miller”, copying every disk himself with batch files. He averaged 50 to 60 orders a week, with highs over 200.
Computer Gaming World later called this “The Apogee Model”, and dated Miller’s idea of “selling the later episodes of shareware” to 1987 and Kingdom of Kroz. It was earning him up to $2,000 a week by 1990, and he gave up his day job. Other Apogee games worked the same way. In March 1991 the magazine noted that the first part of Apogee’s four-game Pharaoh’s Tomb series “comes as shareware and can be found for downloading on virtually every major bulletin board and service (CompuServe, GEnie, Executive Network, for example)”, and that after 20 levels most players found themselves “hooked”.
id Software and Doom
Miller found the programmers who made the model famous at Softdisk. Apogee published their first game, Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons, in December 1990: the first episode was free to copy, and players paid for the rest. The four programmers left Softdisk in February 1991 to form id Software, and Apogee released Wolfenstein 3D in May 1992, its first episode shareware. Tom Hall recalled that Keen “made good money”, and Wolfenstein 3D “made TEN TIMES that”.
id published Doom itself. It gave away the first episode in December 1993, took orders on 1-800-ID-GAMES, and let shops sell boxed copies of the free episode and keep the money. Edge wrote in 1995 that id, “impressed by the success of the technique, exploited it to its full extent with Doom”. It did the same with Quake, whose shareware episode went out in June 1996. That September Computer and Video Games reported that “shareware Doom is installed on millions of machines the world over”.
Apogee kept using shareware too. “We started marketing our games as shareware because it was an inexpensive way to get started,” 3D Realms president George Broussard told Edge in 1995. Scott Miller, Apogee’s co-president, added that it let the company put out an early version of a game “and invite people’s opinions”.
Epic MegaGames
In Potomac, Maryland, Tim Sweeney sold his first game, ZZT, as shareware in 1991, and later thanked Scott Miller for his “early advice and encouragement”. His company became Epic MegaGames. In January 1993 Computer Gaming World’s shareware column recommended two of its games, Castle of the Winds and Jill of the Jungle, and noted that registering Castle of the Winds brought the second volume of the series, a hint sheet and a disk of Epic’s other releases. In November 1994 the column reviewed Jazz Jackrabbit, with six episodes and more than 50 levels in the registered version: $25 for episodes 1 to 3 or 4 to 6, or $39 for all six. Epic’s advertisements told readers where to get the free episodes: CompuServe (GO EPIC), the Exec-PC bulletin board, or the internet by FTP. Epic MegaGames later became Epic Games.
Libraries, registrations and the Amiga
Shareware travelled through the same channels as public domain software: user groups, bulletin boards, mail-order disk libraries and, later, online services and the internet. In Britain it reached Amiga owners mainly through the PD libraries. In September 1991 Amiga Shopper’s Pat Winstanley explained that shareware authors let you try a program and trusted you to send a donation, a system whose “success depends on your honesty - often severely strained when the shareware author is in the United States and wants the donation in dollars”. Several libraries collected payments in sterling and “then pass a lump sum over to the author covering a whole batch of registrations”.
She thought registering was worth it, “since apart from gaining a clear conscience, you will usually receive printed documentation together with the latest upgrade of the program and news of availability of other related software”. As for the authors, she wrote, they “encourage copying and distribution of their products since the wider the audience the greater number of payments they will receive”.
Sources
- George Morrison, Atari Software Protection Techniques (Alpha Systems, 1983), pp. 77–79: freeware, Fluegelman’s three principles, the legal advice, the conversion claims and the scepticism.
- Family Computing vol. 2 no. 3, March 1984: user groups column (PC-Talk and PC-File as freeware, the $20–$50 donation, copyright holders’ request to user groups).
- Sheldon Leemon, “PC-Write Word Processor For PC & PCjr”, COMPUTE! issue 57, February 1985, pp. 82–84: shareware as “user-supported software”, the $10 and $75 prices, what registration bought, the $25 commission, the chain letter comparison, and Bob Wallace.
- Orson Scott Card, COMPUTE! issue 122, October 1990, p. 74: Scott Miller, Kroz, the trilogy model, the prices, Apogee as a one-man company and its orders.
- Computer Gaming World issue 80, March 1991, p. 63: Pharaoh’s Tomb and Apogee’s free first game.
- Amiga Shopper issue 5, September 1991: Pat Winstanley’s educational PD column (shareware, registration in sterling, what registration bought, why authors encourage copying).
- Computer Gaming World issue 102, January 1993: shareware column (Castle of the Winds and Jill of the Jungle, Epic MegaGames of Potomac, Maryland).
- Chuck Miller, “Play Mystic For Me And All That Jazz”, Computer Gaming World issue 124, November 1994, p. 254: Jazz Jackrabbit episodes, levels and prices. Epic MegaGames advertisement in the same issue: where to download the shareware versions.
- Edge issue 24, September 1995, pp. 36–37: 3D Realms and Apogee (shareware and Wolfenstein 3D, id and Doom, George Broussard and Scott Miller quotations).
- Ken Brown, “Duking It Out”, Computer Gaming World issue 142, May 1996: “The Apogee Model”, Miller and Kingdom of Kroz in 1987, his earnings by 1990.
- Computer and Video Games issue 178, September 1996: Quake shareware feature (“shareware Doom is installed on millions of machines”).
- Harry Henderson, Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, revised edition (Facts On File, 2009), pp. 427–428: PC-Talk in 1982, the public broadcasting model, “freeware” as Fluegelman’s trademark and the adoption of “shareware”.
- For id Software’s history with Apogee and Doom’s distribution, see the id Software and Doom entries and their sources; for ZZT and Scott Miller, the ZZT entry.