In 2015 this is quite rare, but in 2002 it was actually a pretty great way to get people to use and begin to depend upon your product so that when they had the money and desire to make a purchasing decision, they'd purchase what they were familiar with. A select few products ended up with the best of both worlds, a fully functional product with no time limit but a frequent 'please buy me' screen that would only be disabled once a keycode had been entered. That is, partially functional software with no time limit but the most important features disabled, and fully functional software with a time limit where it would stop working. The idea was to give you a taste of the product with one floppy disk so that you'd then call the number and order a boxed copy, with manuals and additional templates and a product key.īecause of the additional time required to produce demo software, the industry seemed to gravitate to shareware and trialware. Since DRM didn't really exist yet, and bandwidth didn't really permit software makers to let people download demos directly, what would often happen is that software makers would provide a "demo" of their software that was functionally complete but couldn't save, or they would release a "shareware' version of their software that had some features disabled or missing. Sometimes these were bundled with magazines, sometimes these were just made available on newsgroups and the guy with the most stable dial-up connection made copies for his friends. When the internet was really young, people actually distributed software on floppy disks. eCommerce hadn't taken off yet, so offering software to purchase online and making a purchase online was sort of unusual. Let me explain the concept of demos, trialware, shareware, and commercial products, as it pertains to the origins of the web and the rise of modern computing.īack in the day, there were really only a handful of software publishers.
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