Comment by thewebguyd

> It meant that the way most users would get our software was buying it on floppy disk (or later CD) from a retail software store like CompUSA or Egghead.

On the topic of Windows, this is why Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility was and is such a huge deal.

It wasn't so easy to just update your software if Windows ever made breaking changes, and your users would, rightly, be pretty ticked off if suddenly what they bought no longer works because they upgraded from Win 95 to 98, or 98 to XP.

You had confidence that you could buy a program once, and it'll just happily continue to run for the foreseeable future.

This also made businesses happy. If you liked a particular version of a software product, you bought it, ran it on Windows, and could rest easy knowing it'll just continue to work through version upgrades of the OS.