Ended up in a “junk drawer” in the desk i had the computer on.
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I did, to a limited extent with what I got as gift money for Birthdays and Xmas (MD-DOS games). The rest were copies “acquired” from friends. The games in the 80s that I bought with gift money were more purchases of opportunity at computer sales.
It was 90s era purchase: I paid NZ$108 for Command & Conquer which is apparently NZ$$183 (US$131) in 2021 dollars using a NZD inflation calculator.
edit: I also got stuff from a couple of BBS pre-internet, but a lot of was shareware games.
My friend got Ultima IV for Christmas/Birthday. This game was responsible for at least 60 hours of childhood enjoyment at the C64, including two 10-hour snow day sessions. We defeated the Stygian Abyss, and then somehow never acquired the literal 3-part key to win the damn game.
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Yeah, the last thing the account executive at Software City wanted to see enter his retail establishment was a 12-year-old kid with empty pockets.
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I did not pay anything for software in the 80s. I had software to edit sectors on discs to get rid of any protection (the code was published in magazines I bought though - that was a cost). And then when that was not enough we shared software that cracked software or cracked software itself. Viral - physical disc style.
This all happened because of the huge cost through usual routes that were out of my reach.
I can’t remember a platform where this was not the case. Even the with Apple and Microsoft shape-shiftery…
It was glorious and allowed all of us to learn. I now pay for software because I can and the creators deserve it. This may be the difference - if I were my age in the 1980s I would pay. I was not.
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Here’s a March 1983 InCider article on software pricing. It breaks down production costs, wholesale rices, and royalties.
It mentions a $250 program called VisiCalc…
The many pages of ads have yet more prices. Sierra’s Time Zone listed for $100, and Ultima II went for $60. (page 123)
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I bought one of these cp/m computer+software bundles a year or two before that article (a Morrow Micro Decision). The software was adequate for most of my needs (I had to hack Wordstar to get it to print mathematical symbols on my inkjet printer), though no games. (Fortunately we had the Colossal Cave running on a Terak at the office.) It worked well as a computing appliance.
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And in hexadecimal mind you!
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I wonder why the 1541s were so slow as compared to Apple II drives. You’d think that having their own CPU would make them faster than than the Apple drives (which were “dumb” and required the computer’s CPU to do its work).
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It’s all down to Commodore’s notorious penny pinching. The 1541 was a serial drive based on the 1540 sold for the VIC-20. The 1540 was slow because there was a fault in a its interface chip (and the one on the VIC) which led to data corruption. The corruption was fixed in SLOW software which crippled the drive.
When the C64 came along, the interface chip in the computer was updated and the bug eliminated, but the 1541 kept the original bugged chip, so the C64 had to use the slow transfer routines. And it actually got worse, because the C64’s graphics chip stole one clock cycle every (I think) eight to refresh the screen memory. Effectively, the only difference between the 1540 and 1541 is a slightly different ROM in the drive which takes account of the C64’s graphics timings.
Fast loaders got round this bug by replacing the built-in sluggish disk routines with much faster code. And Commodore eventually got round to shipping the 1570, 1571 and 1581 drives with decent interface chips and they were much better.
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Good old Commodore cutting costs by not having any way of detecting when the drive head reached track zero. So their ingenious solution was to move the drive head 40 steps (40 tracks were the maximum allowed in the 1541) to ensure it got to track 0 no matter what.
And then of course they gave the Amiga drive its irritating CLICK, CLICK when there wasn’t a disk in the drive.
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I remember hand typing programs as written in computer magazines. Those were dark days.
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I will say I do miss the days when I at least had the option to buy software and then just, you know, own it instead of directly or indirectly paying for it forever or being distracted by constant upsell attempts or ads.
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Dear lord yes - and then have to wait a month for them to print the inevitable corrections.
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I’m sure I got hundreds of hours out of Ultima VI, to say nothing of Ultima VII
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I beg to differ 
However: when we bought our TRS-80 in 1982 (used, from my cousin) the thing was already about 3 years old. There was still someone running a business selling this software, on cassette (& from whom we bought some of the software in these photos). You’re right, of course, as by then we were outliers - but a year later, Radio Shack’s Computer Center stores - which had otherwise moved beyond the Model 1 - were still selling some software on cassette (heavily discounted, by then).
(I’ve previously mentioned how we paid someone to (sort of) upgrade it)
Come to think of it, for Christmas of '83 we still could (and did) buy Supreme Ruler on cassette.
And it wasn’t until a year or so ago that I finally found out Dante’s Inferno would suddenly end due to a bug.
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Yeah, in the 1970s (when the so called 1977 “trinity” of early US micros were released – the original Apple ][, the TRS-80 Model I and the Commodore PET) there was some attempt to use tape as storage (and of course some of the earlier hobbyist micros even used paper tape). And it isn’t surprising that Radio Shack would still be selling the stuff years later, but it is interesting how by the 1980s the US had standardized on floppy disks while Britain and much of Europe still used tape.
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A friend had a clone (a Franklin?). He had a “porn” program that showed a woman orally pleasing a man. Green screen graphics, maybe 280x192, so barely clear enough to consider it porn. Best part was the sound effects. Nothing from the beeper; instead, the program moved the floppy drive head in a way that suggested motion, in an decreasing-length loop (getting faster and faster). Sound ended in a distinct rattling, which I guess is the end stop bashing. This was timed with the climax of the porn.
Good times!
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