Whatever programs are most representative, they might have been distributed as shareware. There's still "trial software" today but not like going to a BBS and seeing hundreds of shareware packages, or getting a CD stuffed with them.
I was just chatting with a gentlemen (now in his 70s) who published a small desktop note manager for MS-DOS (Personal Note Manager aka PNM.COM). In 1990, I mailed him a money order and a week or two later got my unlock key by postal mail. That was software activation in MS-DOS times! Although I personally remember it more with the Apple ][, there was copy protection for some MS-DOS disks and inevitably copy protection cracking programs. The Apple had a legion of these systems and programs - Locksmith was one cracker I remember, but there were a dozen other with outlandish names. All worked to copy floppies and defeat the incredibly ingenious on-disk protection schemes publishers used. In my middle school/early teen years I attended more than one "sharing party" where you'd show up with a new box of floppies and leave with lots of new games. Later, companies went to "manual checks" where the game would prompt you for word 5 on line 12 of page 53, etc. I don't remember disk copy protection as much with MS-DOS, but that's possibly because I had a job and could afford to buy software by the time I moved to DOS. MS-DOS itself was widely copied. When a cousin got a new PC with new boot disks, his relatives got an MS-DOS upgrade. If you didn't have a hard drive, there was nothing to upgrade - you just inserted the new floppy next time you booted and you were upgraded. Besides games, a lot of business software was widely copied - I read once that for every copy of Wordstar sold, at least 20 were copied. Someone said once that they should have given Wordstar away for free and just sold documentation. -- andrew fabbro and...@fabbro.org
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