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No one likes dealing with cheaters in video games. However, Call of Duty’s Ricochet anti-cheat system is installing low-level drivers to Windows PCs, which might be going a little further than most users would prefer.
What Is Shareware, and Why Was It So Popular in the 1990s?
Benj Edwards
It’s a crazy idea: Give your software away for free and hope that people like it enough to send you money. That was the idea behind shareware, a popular commercial software model in the 1980s and 1990s. Here’s what made it unique and successful at the time.
The Origins of Shareware
Historians usually credit three men with the creation of the shareware concept to varying degrees.
In 1982, Andrew Fluegelman created a telecommunications program called PC-Talk on his new IBM PC and began sharing it with his friends. Before long, he realized that he could put a special message inside the software asking for a $25 donation in return for future updates to the program. (Fluegelman called his concept “freeware,” but he reportedly later trademarked the term, leading to its limited use in the industry. The term was redefined after his death in 1985.)