alt Hacker NewsThat software box on the shelf at Babbage’s is a cherished memory—a tangible oddity of software distribution prior to broadband, now just a relic in memory. Most of us assumed it would last forever. We get our software at the click of a button now, but we traded something for that.
Software felt more valuable when you forked over £60+ ( Which was worth a lot more back then ) and got a physical box, with a chunky set of instruction manuals and 5+ floppy disks.
It wasn't even broadband that destroyed that experience, when CDs came around developers realised they had space to just stick a PDF version of the manual on the CD itself and put in a slip that tells you to stick in the CD, run autorun.exe if it didn't already, and refer to the manual on the CD for the rest!