What Is Shareware, and Why Was It So Popular in the 1990s?

What Is Shareware, and Why Was It So Popular in the 1990s?

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.