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The contents of the Craplet page were merged into Shovelware. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page.
Being quite old, I was in the position in the 1980s to procure "cheap" PC/AT clones for work. They were invariably accompanied with a pack of 10 or even 20 floppies, one of which often contained the very useful PC-Write, and maybe one or two more might be useful. but the rest were not. This was the MS-DOS 3 era. I thought that the term "Shovelware" originated at that time, before CD-ROMs and definitely before Windows. In comparison, most of the stuff that came later on the better CDs, pre world wide web, such as Libris Brittania, was actually useful to someone, somewhere. I do agree that many other CDs were truly shovelware, but not all.
I am not going to edit the article yet, to see if anyone else remembers the era of floppy based shovelware. It would be good if someone could find a set of such disks or an advert from that era that showed that cheap PC clones would come with some "useful" software. My memory is quite good but we would really need some references.
