How did people get apps on their computer before the Internet?

Question

The Internet has existed since the 90s, but how did people get apps and games installed on their computers before that and how were they accessed and saved?

Answer 1

People used storage media, which they carried around to the machines they wanted to use the software on. The same way music and video were physically distributed in the late 20th century on tape and CD.

Very early on, programs and data were stored on paper tape and punched cards. Then magnetic tape. Then floppy disks. Then CD-ROMs. Even cartridges containing semiconductor memory were sometimes used, particularly for game consoles. (Now that I think about it, we still use cartridges as USB flash drives.)

You might get your software directly from the computer manufacturer. The OS usually came this way. Early on, most software was custom and written by the user (often a large company). Then custom software houses started popping up. Much stuff was ordered in the mail, especially before retail computer stores existed in every major town.

Small computer stores selling software, parts, etc., used to be everywhere, at least in Canada. They're much less common now, relatively speaking. There were two within walking distance, where I lived in the 1990s and was in the suburbs! Computers failed more often, technology was moving faster, and people didn't order as much online then. You might visit the computer store several times per year if you have the budget, often to buy the software.

Here's Windows 98, out of the box, as you might buy for a machine without any operating system on it:

Included is a paper manual, a registration card to mail off to Microsoft, a credit for some free Internet service, and Windows 98 itself: the boot floppy (for computers that could not boot from CD) and the Windows 98 install CD.

By this point (1998), floppy disks were too small to hold most major software releases and were limited to boot disks and small files such as device drivers. Network distribution was also common by then, but many people were on dial-up. (Windows 98 would take days to download at that speed.) The disc itself is nearly full, with Windows taking several hundred megabytes and the rest being movies and music bonus content. Before long, it would not be uncommon to have an entire set of CDs to install software, echoing the sets of floppies sometimes seen in the 80s and early 90s. Then higher density DVDs were used.

It's worth noting that plenty of people "borrowed" such kits from a friend rather than buying them themselves. Floppies, and then much later, CDs, could also be duplicated by the user. Software piracy is not new, and with commercial software, various steps were taken to combat that. For example, you might need to enter codes from the manual that were uniquely matched to the disc in the same kit.

The Internet started competing against physically distributing media (not just for software, but film and music and everything else too) in the 2000s, finally coming to dominate in the last ten years or so.

Answer 2

People are focusing on floppies and tapes. But the question is literally tagged with floppy-disk, so pointing them out may not be that helpful. The more general answer perhaps is that you went to a physical store. Almost everybody had bought their computer at a physical store, so at very least they could go back to that same store to buy some software without much of a discovery process.

In the 90's, every small town had multiple places that sold software in boxes as a physical product. Radio Shack was ubiquitous here in the US, and it always had some shareware disks or the like. At peak, that one brand had something like 8000 total stores, and the US has about 5000 towns with at least 5000 people. There were several other brands of small retail stores like Electronics Boutique and Egghead Software that would fit in a small retail storefront, strip mall, or small shop in a large shopping mall. There were also a ton of small independent or local stores in many places.

Big-Box consumer electronics stores like Best Buy and Circuit City were a little less common than the small stores since they were physically larger. But they were also pretty common. There were something like 2000 Best Buy stores at peak.

Past that, I can remember seeing occasional software at grocery and drug stores in the mid 90's. It wasn't a major staple or anything. But by that point the market was large enough that you'd occasionally see family friendly shareware games or some crappy third tier desktop publishing software for making "Welcome Home" banners. Department stores like Target always had an electronics section that stocked at least an aisle of PC games. Bookshops often had a software section as well. Buy our book on how to use Turbotax... And also buy Turbotax, was a pretty common kind of bundle deal.

Grocery stores, book stores, news stands, etc., also had an aisle full of magazines. Among The New Yorker and Guns Today or whatever, you would also see Nintendo Power, Mac User, Amiga Format, Byte, etc. All of those magazines would have ads so you could order stuff by mail.

It was definitely harder to find software in the 80's when computing was much more of a niche hobby. You might need to go to a nearby big city to find a specialist store until the late 80's. But by the 90's, software was kind of ubiquitous. In a developed country like the US the majority of households had a computer by the end of the 90's, so it was just a huge market for any retailer to ignore.

So by the 90's, a typical computer user would probably have dozens of places they could potentially buy games and other software from, with something like a reasonable drive to a mall a town or two over on a weekend. You go, pay $20 - $50 to get a Big Box. The box would have a manual, a tape or floppy in the 80's, floppies or a CD in the 90's. Stick it in the computer, and click "setup" or type "install" or whatever the process was for that app on that computer, and off to the races. If you had one of the three supported models of Dot Matrix printers, you could print a Welcome Home banner with your choice of a clip art duck or a clip art dog 20 minutes after you got home from the store.

Answer 3

1. Typed them in from magazines and books, saved them on tape or floppy.

2. Get software by loading it from a tape or floppy borrowed from a friend/colleague/school/club and copy it to yourself.

3. Use a modem to download or upload from a bulletin board system.

4. Buy commercial games/programs on tape/floppy.

Answer 4

Several ways depending on the era which you are talking about:

1. I have some really old commercial software that came on 8" floppy disk. These are pretty rare today but were quite common in the pre-IBM PC days:
2. After that, and a lot due to the introduction of the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and then the IBM PC, the 5.25" floppy disk came to dominate. Very similar to the earlier 8" disks but smaller:
3. Next came the 3.5" "floppy" disk. The media was floppy but the hard plastic case made the overall unit not floppy:
4. After that, downloads from dial-up systems started taking over. File repositories on "FidoNet" Bulletin Board Systems, CompuServe, AOL, and others started being used for distributing software especially "shareware" and "demo" software. Around the same time, CDROM also became a distribution media and that continues to this day:
5. After that, the internet began to evolve as a viable, and inexpensive with near immediate fulfillment, method of software distribution.

There are, of course, some other methods which were used. The earliest consumer programs were printed in magazines and you typed in the code, some commercial software was distributed on "magnetic tape" usually targeted at mainframe/minicomputer systems. There were, and still are, some other magnetic tape formats usually in cartridge formats.

And we cannot forget Cassette Tape format!

I still have a cassette with "MicroChess" for the KIM-1:

Answer 5

As far as the question is not limited to commercial software, here's an alternative view.

Before the advent of the internet or any widely used long distance packed-switched networks, long distance data distribution among UNIX computers was achieved using a store-and-forward system called UUCP, which facilitated, among other things, distribution of discussion groups (Usenet).

It was a distributed (without a single main server, unlike a BBS) discussion board system with hundreds if not thousands of various "newsgroups", some of which were used to distribute source code (partially archived at comp.sources.*), either platform-specific in an appropriately named group, or portable enough across different CPU architectures and UNIX-like platforms to be compilable and usable with little effort.

Answer 6

One method wasn't mentioned here: radio broadcasting.
The official Czechoslovak Radio used to broadcast a special night show for computer freaks in the late eighties, and it ended with a few short programmes for ZX Spectrum, which the listeners could record on audio tape and then LOAD ""

Answer 7

The internet has existed since the 1960s, the World Wide Web is a 1990s development. 'Apps' is used to refer to software obtained via curated 'Stores', like the Apple App Store and the Google Play store. Other than Steam, those didn't exist before the late 2000's. In general, the term is 'software'.

We used cassette tape and floppy disks, or we downloaded from bulletin boards over the phone. We typed programs in from listings in books and magazines. Sometimes we even got software broadcast over television via Teletext services like CEEFAX.

Answer 8

Just to toss a log on the fire.

One of the more novel mechanics in terms of mass distribution was through an optical scanning device.

Specifically, this was a device, about a foot long, that you plugged into your computer. It was a mini scanner. The sensor was about an inch wide, and moved down the track, like a normal flat bed scanner without the bed. And it wasn't a generic pixel scanner, it only scanned the encoded images, like a barcode or QR code scanner.

Dr Dobbs actually published these in their magazine for, perhaps, about a year or so.

Edit:

After some research and help from a fellow on another forum, this is the device I'm talking about:

Cauzin Softstrip https://rich12345.tripod.com/museum2/softstrip.html

Edit 2:

Ha! I found it!

Go to page 711 within https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_11/page/710/mode/2up and you'll see the softstrip images. I simply wasn't looking late enough, October '86. I was looking through '85 and early 86.

On page 693, they mention what they're doing.

Also, at a time there was some software distributed in magazines on flimsy 45 RPM records. And, I believe, at some point there were radio broadcasts of software that were meant to be recorded and loaded into a computer.

Answer 9

Plenty of answers here detailing how to get your hands on some physical medium with a piece of software on it, but I don't see any of them touching on the point of

how did people get apps and games installed on their computers [...] and how were they accessed and saved?

So, there were several ways. In the very early days, before my time (aka in the 70s and 80s) computers often didn't have a hard drive in them. Each time you booted them up, you had to supply some physical media (a tape or a diskette) that contained the software. You put in the media and pressed the power button. The computer loaded the software in memory and you continued from there. This is quite similar to older game consoles that need to have a CD or a cartridge in, before you can do anything with them.

As the 90s rolled around, hard drives became cheap enough that most computers started to have them. Or maybe a bit earlier, as I said, this was before my time so I'm a bit murky on the dates. This meant that software could now be copied to the computer itself. Operating systems started to reside on the hard drive, while other software could still be run directly from an external media, or also copied to the hard drive. This copying part was known as "installing" and most software usually came with an extra "installer" program which ran directly from the disk and copied the software to the hard drive. A lot like installing an app on your phone, except you had to launch it manually from the physical media. Most also included and "uninstaller" program that you could later use to delete the software from your hard drive.

As for saving data - well, you also used either the same (or different) external media, or saved your files to the hard drive.

Added:

Also I should note that back then you had to be at least somewhat familiar with all the folders (directories) on your computer. Today when you install an app on your phone you have no idea where exactly its files are. It's just "somewhere on the phone". Similarly with saving files to "My Documents" or whatever. But back then you had to know at least the path to the executable file itself so that you could locate it and run it. And when you saved/loaded some files, you had to know where they are located too.

However that applies only if you had a filesystem to begin with, so that includes various disks and diskettes. Tapes were different, but I have no experience with those.

Answer 10

Another aspect that no one has mentioned yet is, many computers had dial-up modems that worked over telephone landlines. They worked by converting streams of data to sound, which was sent as a voice call, and back (modem originally was short for MODulator-DEModulator, although today it mostly means boxes that connect to cable and DSL internet). These transmitted at a tiny fraction of the speed of the modern Internet (early ones might transmit only a few hundred bytes per second), but files were much smaller then, too.

Some people would get extra landlines to their homes and have a modem listen on them, which would pick up and connect any user who dialed up to a text-only forum called a Bulletin-Board System (BBS). This would run a program that (like a console on Linux, Mac or Windows today) emulated a terminal with sixteen colors. this normally brought up a menu, but you could log in to leave messages, play some games (Rogue Trader being one of the most popular) and download files. The vast majority of BBSes had only one landline with one modem, so users would need to be considerate and not hog the line.

In the U.S., the phone company would not normally charge extra for local calls, no matter how many you made or how long they lasted, even if someone were using the phone line all day, so all BBSes recruited from a local area code. Some were free, and some charged a subscription fee. They would advertise in computer ’zines, or I remember some stores having flyers with a list of local BBSes. However, many would regularly call each other up, or exchange data through what was called the FidoNet.

When the Internet came along, most of these were replaced by dial-up Internet Service Providers. There was an intermediate stage with proprietary networks that were nationwide, with offices in each area code where subscribers could make a local call and connect to a modem. AOL is the best-known, gave all its users Internet access in the mid-’90s, and eventually stopped offering dial-up service at all, instead charging for access to its subscriber-only chat rooms from the Internet. Most phone companies have since replaced their old analog wires with Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) service, and now offer high-speed Internet connections over those. Nevertheless, a few BBSes have hung around, replacing their landline connections with Telnet-protocol connections to an Internet address.

Today, add-ons for some vintage computers plug into the same ports as a vintage modem and emulate one. A variant of that at the time was to connect two computers with a “null modem cable,” which simply connected the input pin of one computer’s serial port to the output pin of the other, and could be used for a sort of two-person LAN party.

Also, if you’re reading this site and have not seen WarGames yet, you absolutely should!

Answer 11

There were a myriad number of ways that consumers would get software for their computers. You could buy physical media from a store, or by mail order, or by calling a toll-free number. You could download digital media from things like Usenet and BBS systems. People would copy software onto all kinds of media, from disks to audio cassette tapes. Software listings were found in some magazines that you could subscribe to monthly, quarterly, annually, or something else. It sounds crazy now, but back in the 1980's and perhaps earlier, you could go to various stores that sold magazines or electronics and find various code listings that you'd have to painstakingly type in one line at a time, sometimes for hundreds of lines. Before the day of the Internet, people came up with all kinds of creative ways to share and distribute software in various forms.

Answer 12

Way back, you'd load a bootstrap loader into the computer using toggle switches on the front of the computer ). The loader would read in an inital program via paper tape, typically from the paper tape reader on the side of the teletype that acted as the console. That program might be a more sophisticated loader. Finally you'd "boot" the computer.

Here is the front panel on a PDP-8

Notice that the switches are group into 3 to a color. That's because the PDP line used Octal (3 bits) rather than Hex (4 bits) as the number base. You'd get the bit pattern right and then toggle the load (?? - it's been a while) switch. Also note that there are 18 switches available, even though the PDP-8 is a 12 bit machine (sorry, I don't know why, PDP-8s are before even my time).

The "Rim Loader" bunch of octal numbers in the rectangle on the left is probably the bootstrap loader - all 32 instructions, each 12 bits long.

Anecdote

Legend at my first employer had it that a much bigger competitor was trying to move into our business (which was automation software for paper mills). They used PDP-11s (I think) and much of their software was on paper tape. They had just about finished up their system when they went home for the weekend. The procedure was to stash the paper tape in a drawer in the computer cabinet, lock the cabinet and go home.

The computer used magnetic core memory (which was non-volatile), so it didn't need to be loaded from paper tape very often.

Over the weekend, something happened. The paper tape caught on fire, burning the computer and effectively all the software.

We offered to get the customer up and running in less than a month. Everyone in the company set to work taking a system they'd installed in another customer's mill and converting it to this company's needs. The result was our first product (everything had been highly customized before that).

Our competitor stepped back from being our competitor after than. But, 5 years later, they bought us. The project manager (and the guy who'd locked the cabinet) ended up running the new subsidiary (and being my direct boss). He heard references to this story many times.