Re:He Created the Oregon Trail
by peter303 on Sunday November 21, 2021 @03:44PM
(#29299523)
Store-bought software was a co-revolution with home personal computers. Before then it was commercial oriented mainframe software. The mainframe computer manufacturers wrote some software; corporate users wrote some software; consulting software companies some for a rather small market.
Software stores didnt really get started until 1976 or so. Oregon Trail was 5 years before that. MicroSoft was an early vendor with BASIC for the Altair, then other PCs in 1975. I attended the first West Coast Computer Faire in 1977 where there were a few software vendors including MicroSoft. Floppy disks were just getting started. Alternatives were punch tape, cassette tapes, and telephone modem downloads.
The next big software revolution was downloadable self-installing internet apps, pioneered by Apple. In most cases this is just just 2 to 4 clicks of a mouse. No messy purchase of box in the store, copying multiple disks into the computer, and praying your license key was valid.
Software stores didnt really get started until 1976 or so. Oregon Trail was 5 years before that. MicroSoft was an early vendor with BASIC for the Altair, then other PCs in 1975. I attended the first West Coast Computer Faire in 1977 where there were a few software vendors including MicroSoft. Floppy disks were just getting started. Alternatives were punch tape, cassette tapes, and telephone modem downloads.
The next big software revolution was downloadable self-installing internet apps, pioneered by Apple. In most cases this is just just 2 to 4 clicks of a mouse. No messy purchase of box in the store, copying multiple disks into the computer, and praying your license key was valid.