Trust is a file format. Phil Katz compressed it into 47 dollars and a handshake that crossed ten thousand bulletin boards.
In 1989, Phil Katz released PKZIP 1.0 into the world, and the world he released it into was the 640K. PKZIP was shareware — a word that meant, precisely, this: the program was free to copy, free to distribute, free to use, and accompanied by a text file (usually VENDOR.DOC or README.1ST) that said, in language ranging from politely hopeful to quietly desperate, “If you find this software useful, please send $47 to the address below.” Forty-seven dollars. Not fifty, which would have been round and therefore suspicious. Not forty-five, which would have been too obviously discounted. Forty-seven dollars — a number that suggested the author had calculated his costs down to the dollar and was asking for exactly what the program was worth, no more, no less, and trusting the user to agree. The ZIP format that PKZIP created became the lingua franca of the 640K. Every bulletin board system stored its downloads as ZIP files. Every shareware distributor — the big ones, like the Public Software L...
From the lore of Conventional Memory.