Shareware - Back when we had the relative safety of hardware too dumb to stuff trojan horses in, and write protectable operating system disks, it was commonplace to have a vendor at your local user group with floppy diskettes full of new stuff to try out, for $2-3 per disk. There are thousands of disks with dozens of programs on each.
This was mobile code on a scale that is currently impossible. Once we get capability based security that protects the hardware and our data from things we run by default, it's possible it'll make a comeback, and there will be another wild explosion of creativity in programming.
This was mobile code on a scale that is currently impossible. Once we get capability based security that protects the hardware and our data from things we run by default, it's possible it'll make a comeback, and there will be another wild explosion of creativity in programming.