COMPUTER WORLD
Once upon a time, in the early 1980s to be exact, you could pay hundreds of dollars for a PC program, or you could download a shareware program at the shocking high speed of 1200 bits per second (BPS). You’d then try the program, and if you liked it, could buy it for a fraction of the price of a commercial program. Then along came the web, and we could download programs at breathtaking speeds from 28.-33.6 kilobytes per second (Kbps). It was then, as programs grew from kilobites to megabites in size, that some thought a library of freeware and shareware programs on the web would be a great idea.