Nelson Ford

With the growth of the Internet, by 1998, the distribution of shareware by disk and CD-ROM was beginning to wane while order processing was booming, and with 13+ years of 100-hour work weeks taking their toll on Nelson and Kay Ford, they sold PsL to Digital River, Inc., an NYSE-listed, online-order-processing company, and retired.

In 1985, Nelson Ford began working on a conference of shareware programmers, bulletin board system operators, and shareware disk distributors with the goal of creating an industry trade organization. As a result of the attendance and hard work of such industry leaders as Jim "Button" Knopf and Bob Wallace and many others, the Association of Shareware Professionals was created in 1987. Nelson Ford served on the first Board Of Directors. After more than 25 years, ASP is still a very active, important organization for shareware professionals. In 2001, Nelson Ford was inducted into the ASP Hall Of Fame.

In 1984, Nelson Ford wrote a column named The Public Library in Softalk-PC magazine. When people around the world were not able to get programs discussed in the column because they lacked economical access to bulletin board systems, they wrote to Nelson Ford asking for copies, which he also made for a disk fee. This service quickly snowballed into a full-time job, resulting in the creation of Public (software) Library (PsL) to provide the service. Nelson's wife, Kay Ford, ran the operation of PsL while Nelson ran the technical side.

Eventually, as the volume of software increased and CD-ROM drives in PCs became common, most of PsL's shareware distribution shifted to CD-ROMs where many hundreds of programs could be put on each monthly CD-ROM. During the boom years of shareware disk distribution, new vendors were popping up all the time. As the CD-ROM and the Internet took over, these disk vendors died out, thus leaving PsL the first (1980) and most likely the very last (1997) company to distribute shareware on diskettes.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, virtually no shareware authors had the ability to accept credit card orders at all, much less via live operators at toll-free numbers, the way most people are accustomed to making such orders. Authors could accept only cash or checks mailed directly to them and thus missed out on potential sales.

In the late 1980s, PsL initiated an order-processing service for shareware authors in which live operators took orders over the phone at toll-free numbers. This was not an easy service to provide as banks were reluctant to give credit card merchant accounts to mail- or phone-order businesses. PsL had to change banks several times and one time lost money when a bank went bankrupt. But eventually things settled down, and some programmers began receiving from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars a month in orders—substantially more than they would have received accepting payment only by cash or check.

Many terms were being used for freely-distributal software in the early 1980s. In his column on such software in Softalk-PC magazine, Nelson Ford held a contest to come up with a standard name. The most popular name was shareware, and that name was adopted for generic use.See "Association of Shareware Professionals" web site.

In the mid 1980s, Nelson Ford wrote CardShark Hearts, for playing Hearts against three computer opponents, CardShark Spades, for playing Spades against the computer, and CardShark Bridge Tutor, for learning to play Contract Bridge.

In 1979, Nelson Ford got his first personal computer, a Radio Shack Model II. In 1980, he got one of the first IBM-PCs available in Texas and shortly after that helped start the Houston Area League Of PC Users, which became the largest PC user group in the country with well over 10,000 members.

Nelson Ford (born 1946) was one of the founders of shareware software distribution, of HAL-PC (the Houston Area League of PC Users, a PC user group which grew to over 10,000 members), of the Association of Shareware Professionals, founder of the Public (software) Library, the largest commercial library of public domain and shareware software, and of the first major order processing service for shareware programmers. In 1984, through his shareware column in Softalk-PC magazine, he was responsible for standardizing the use of the term shareware for free-trial software. He wrote several shareware games: CardShark Hearts, CardShark Spades, and CardShark Bridge Tutor. Nelson Ford was inducted into the Shareware Hall Of Fame in August 2001.

Nelson Ford was born in 1946 in San Antonio, Texas, USA. He served 4 years in the United States Marine Corps, 19 months in Viet Nam. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a BBA in Accounting and moved to Houston, Texas where he met and married Kay Hightower Ford. He became a Certified Public Accountant in Texas and worked for Daniel Industries, Inc. and Pennzoil Company before forming Public (software) Library. He and Kay are retired and living in Hot Springs Village, Arkansas.