While many of the CDs contain shareware programs, a number branched into music, graphics, animations and movies. For this market, CD makers would declare their CDs 'BBS Ready', meaning an easily-readable directory of file descriptions was located on the CDs to be read by the BBS software.

Some computer bulletin board services would attach banks of CD-ROM drives to their machines to allow users to access the discs, allowing the system operators (SysOps) to claim the BBS had thousands of files available. As a result, many otherwise-lost pieces of computer history were gathered up in the trawling nets of these individuals and companies and were preserved for future generations. As material 'ran out', that is, as sellers of these CDs found they were unable to easily find shareware programs and files, the hunt began to track down every last file and item that could make the quarterly or monthly quota. Initially containing less than the full capacity of the discs (600mb, later 700mb) these items eventually began brimming with any sort of computer data that could be packaged and sold. One of the most historically important artifacts to come from the home computer telecommunications revolution was shareware CDs, compact discs put out by companies containing hundreds of megabytes of shareware.

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