Excerpt:
Shareware was born simultaneously in two places. In Tiburon, California, it was born as the program PC-Talk, fathered by Andrew Fluegelman. In Bellevue, Washington, it sprang to life as PC-File, the brain child of Jim Knopf. This is my half of the story. I'm Jim Knopf, the father of Shareware. This is the story I used to call "How did I get into this mess?"
I needed a program to print mailing labels for a local church congregation. I had an Apple computer, so I wrote the program in Applesoft BASIC. I wanted more than just a label printing program, so I wrote a general purpose database program. I liked what I produced so much the program itself became a hobby - something I continued to work on and improve in my spare time.