The Birth of the Sharing Culture.

by Tom Koltai at 04:12AM (EST) on February 5, 2009
Culture: is a shared, learned, symbolic system of values, beliefs and attitudes that shapes and influences perception and behavior
Very few obstacles erected by man are successful in halting the ocean.
Dykes, dames, flood-gates, Thames tributary locks, don’t stem the tide; they just block one narrow area of interest.
ENIAC, a wave, turned into a king tide in 1975, when a couple of school leavers added a teletype keyboard and basic to a home hobbyist microcomputer (Altair) that was essentially 19 LEDS with 21 on/off switches.
I remember the seventies; – PdP will be the last computer that any university needs.
Then the eighties and computers became ubiquitous – to the early technology adopters.
And the early adopters, once they unpacked their nice new PC’s discovered they had to write their own software. Basic-A was the available EPROM chip – so everyone wrote basic routines, and began sharing their ideas at impromptu gabfests at computer shows.
A new industry was born, socially developed software.
Consumers became users, then critics, then programmers. It was a closed self-sustaining loop, but a loop with no entry fee beyond an open mind and the willingness to buy a computer and make use of it. Anyone who didn’t have a computer looked at these nerds with amazement. What the hell were they all so excited about.
And any psychiatrist will tell you that it was about exploration, control and above all else, logic. If one typed the wrong key, the program wouldn’t slam the door, storm out of the house and shout from the car window “I’m going to mothers.”
It wouldn’t result in the sack (mostly), nor would it stop the sun coming up tomorrow. The wrong key would mean that the program just wouldn’t work right.
After a few such errors, most consumer/programmers became adept at scanning and correcting their own code and from this perfected code came the household names we now all recognise so well. 20/20, Paradox, Dbase, Borland.
No well you wouldn’t recognize them. They were only there for a while. But like any industry, they started, peaked, sales dropped off and they either brought out a new version or bit the dust.
Why?
Technology. New programmers were writing better software and releasing it for $29.95 as shareware.
The concept of shareware really took off with the advent of the Commercial Internet. If you needed to  do something on your computer, then there was a piece of shareware on Simtel, your local BBS, or Walnut Creek CD-Rom that would pretty much do what you wanted. Some of it was free, some of it was free for a time and some of it you had to pay for from day one, OR suffer reduced functionality.
Shareware. A good business model, for cottage industry programmers, to get their stuff out there and earning a quid. No packaging, no disk required – just upload it to Simtel and wait for the viral distribution to occur.
The social sharing culture was born of innovation, necessity and above all else, a desire to learn, to master the machine and make the damn thing earn its keep.

Gee, this shareware is pretty good stuff. What else can we share? The users asked……….