On a trip to Windsor House, I noticed a rack full of CD-Roms at $40 a pop. My cynicism kicked in. I thought: 'Score another big victory for the pirates.' On closer inspection, I discovered that it was all legitimate. The price had fooled me. What I was looking at was shareware on CD-Rom. Shareware has been part of the PC revolution almost from its beginnings. For those too young to remember, much of the impetus behind the revolution came on the heels of 1960s and 70s youth culture. Indeed, the beginning was almost all shareware or write-your-own software. If you wanted something, you had to do it yourself. The normal way to obtain shareware is on the Internet, but it can take a long time to download. The answer is to get a CD-Rom. Explore the World of Software which has scores of titles on just about anything. I picked up two on languages and dictionaries, but there are titles devoted to utilities, a pinball collection, a mahjongg (sic) collection, a chess collection, Win 95 wallpaper collection, the Bible, literature, browsers, Internet plug-ins and more. Many are primitive. They are not professionally done, they may crash your PC and often are impossible to load. I tried several applications from my Dictionary Collection for Windows 95 and had varying results. An easy Arabic application wanted me to unzip two files, copy them on to two floppy disks, name one disk 'Disk 1' and the other 'Disk 2' and then run setup from Disk 1. I could not be bothered, so I skipped it. Another application was supposed to help teach Japanese. I installed it and the first thing it did was ask me to log on to the university server. Another loser. I tried a few English dictionaries and grammar checkers but they were primitive. The punctuation checker was silly. No sentence had more than five words in it. This was meant to be for children, and adults. NJStar, however, turned out to be a real gem. This is a Chinese-language word processor with pinyin entry. I was able to type something like zhong hua ren min gong he guo (the People's Republic of China) and almost get it right. It did not get the right character for gong, but that was fixed fairly easily. Of close to 200 applications, I have found one or two useful - making it well worth the $80 for the disks. Don't forget the software is not free. Some applications will run for a month and then pack up. Others ask you to do the right thing and send in the money. The prices are usually reasonable, less than US$50, often only $10 or $20. PROS AND CONS Product: Shareware CD-Roms Platform: Mainly Windows 95/NT Price: Usually less than $50 Pros: Lots of software at rock-bottom prices Cons: Not much of it is all that good
