Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!PSUVM.PSU.EDU!ART100 From: ART100@PSUVM.PSU.EDU ("Andy Tefft 862-6728", 814) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: Re: Shareware - does it really work? Message-ID: <8910191002.aa11463@SMOKE.BRL.MIL> Date: 19 Oct 89 13:39:00 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: ART100@psuvm.psu.edu Organization: The Internet Lines: 31 > >I agree. >It has always amazed me that some people in the MS-DOS world can actually make >a comfortable living writing shareware. Maybe it's the general maturity level >of the type of user. The only shareware author I know of in the Apple world is >the author of Red Ryder. II) made that possible> And I believe he finally went commercial. This makes a lot of sense when you consider the user bases of Apple vs IBM & clones & mac. The Apple II has long been considered a hacker's machine. The mac has NEVER been that and the IBM very rarely. IBM users are more used to having to buy all their software, while Apple II users USED to do a lot of writing (until the GS, that is, when programs could get really fancy and it became more impossible to write anything "useful" without buying a compiler of one kind or another). I don't know ANYONE who writes programs for the Mac. And the only programming I've ever experienced on IBM's was in high school when the apples were replaced by pc's for BASIC programming. There used to be a LOT of PD software for the Apple - this was back around 1980 when I got 10 disks full of it with my //e (ok, got the //e around '83? but the software was dated from 1979 to 1982). Any of you in users groups out there are probably familiar with this stuff. But it's just not fancy. Anyway the point is just that it's hard to teach people with the general hacker mentality to buy software, just like it's hard to teach people with the general Mac mentality to write it!