My company "Lindley Systems" did all this from 1980 (when I was 14) until the mid 90s, in the Heathkit (later Heath/Zenith) arena. I still have master diskettes and original manuals ready for taking to the Xerox shop, and only a few years ago tossed boxes full of registration cards (with 13 cent stamps on them).

We made the transition from Heathkit HDOS to CP/M and MS-DOS but never shipped a product for MS Windows. We almost had a product ready in 1996 but then MS "upgraded" VB 3 to VB 4 and we started a rewrite, almost completed just in time for the "upgrade" to VB 5 - by which time our market had moved on.

It was a fun time to build custom and specialized hardware and software.

> We couldn’t reach potential customers directly (there was no web), so we had to groom editors of computer magazines and feed information to them, hoping they would print it in their magazines.

Editors of computer magazines were the "influencers" in the '80s.

What a great read. I've lived all of my professional life (2014-) shipping productive code by just pushing to repos or specific branches. I avoid getting into mobile app development due to what a pain it is to get to the stores and stay compliant with ever-changing policies. I can't even imagine what was like delivering software in a cartridge or CD without a chance to update afterwards. It feels like such a titanic endeavor

We built and shipped educational software to schools in the 80s and 90s; starting with homecomputers and pcs and later on (of course) only pcs. Good times sending stacks of disks off with the postal service. We also, starting late 80s (running on an msx2), had a BBS which was written by me so it had the licensing/logistics/accounting in there; barely anyone used it for getting their software, but we used it ourselves for mostly everything.

Good times; not having to worry about library versions/updates was nice actually. Besides turbo Pascal (later delphi), we had no 3rdparty dependencies up until we sold the company.