What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s
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Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s
#2Shareware was a great increment from the publisher model. And then of course, AppStore is the real game changer.
Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s
#3Shareware was a great increment from the publisher model. And then of course, AppStore is the real game changer.
I think internet was the real game changer. Once bandwidth got good enough for downloading software, it got easier to sell and patch anything. I can't imagine living 7-8 months without patches.
AppStore is definitely a step up, but it may be too crowded.
Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s
#4Shareware was a great increment from the publisher model. And then of course, AppStore is the real game changer.
I think internet was the real game changer. Once bandwidth got good enough for downloading software, it got easier to sell and patch anything. I can't imagine living 7-8 months without patches. AppStore is definitely a step up, but it may be too crowded.
I agree. Before any "AppStore", there were countless avenues to getting software. Plus, software finally got online "profiles" so to speak that allowed people to learn more about it before purchasing/downloading.
Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s
#5This reminds me of the book, The Masters Of Doom.
John Carmack, et al. Had to be quite creative on the programming side of things.
Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s
#6As far as selling the biggest difference between now and then was back then software could only be shipped on floppy disks, so it was more like manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping physical merchandise.
Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s
#7> Now in those days when you almost never sent out patch disks; generally you had to wait 6-8 months to ship a new version and you had to charge the customer for the update. Trapeze only needed one floppy but Deltagraph shipped on something like 10 disks. Paying for hundreds of thousands of disks is expensive; add to that printing of manual updates and boxes and shipping and you never did this casually. So the version we sent to the duplicators had to be perfect and live for months. I was always the final arbiter of what shipped. Thankfully we never had an issue with either 4 versions of Trapeze or the 5 of Deltagraph.
We never had an issue (with a shipped version)
Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s
#8Shareware was a great increment from the publisher model. And then of course, AppStore is the real game changer.
I think internet was the real game changer. Once bandwidth got good enough for downloading software, it got easier to sell and patch anything. I can't imagine living 7-8 months without patches. AppStore is definitely a step up, but it may be too crowded.
Just prior to doing my first internet project for BT back in 94 I spent a year working on a Oracle forms project to manage the UK's SMDS network.
When it came to delivery you had to install in the correct order 15-16 separate 3.5 inch floppy disks - before you could install our forms application :-) took me and the other developer 3 day to install the 6 or so pilot users -
We also had to take up a spare server at the last minute as they had neglected to order the hardware - luckily they did have a network so the network hardware we also brought as insurance wasn't needed.
Back in the 80's I also ran the production side of our apple and pet software biz - I recall having to stay late to ring up Microsoft (in new mexico) about a very strange bug in USD pascal on apple hardware.
Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s
#9Shareware was a great increment from the publisher model. And then of course, AppStore is the real game changer.
I'd argue that the AppStore model is several steps backward from shareware, websites, etc. Yes, you get cheap updates, but you're once again beholden to the retailer in order to get your product noticed, it's harder to create apps that deal with social commentary, you've once again got to calculate in retailer overhead in determining a product price, etc. Hell, the bad old days let you include a catalog in with your product so customers could purchase stuff directly from you without the retailers demanding their pound of flesh. So no, the AppStore is not a game changer by any means.
Re: What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s
#10Demo of Trapeze by the author:
http://archive.org/details/Business1987_3?start=660