I wasn't around at the time though so I might be wrong. My impression was that bulletin boards were so disjointed and small back then that it was easy for a small group of elitists to have their say on what good freeware was but they were mostly the same guys who reject talks regarding usability, regarding design, and it was more of a "at least you are getting something functional for free and how dare you question this developer's hard work" and it was mostly shareware who tried to do more of the quality software.
-Paul Keith
I don't recall it being like that at all.
For openers, there were no core groups of elitists that had any influence worth mentioning since the BBS world was not as connected as the web is today. So while you may have had some sort of "wonk" status on a local BBS or in a mega-portal discussion group over at Compuserve or Delphi - it was still a far cry from the amount of clout a blogger might garner today.
Most of the "elite" (if that's even the correct term) were paid magazine columnists like John Dvorak, Jerrry Pournelle, Bob Ciarcia and Don Lancaster.
BBS systems were local out of necessity because you accessed them via a dial-up POTS connection. So if you didn't want to go broke paying toll or long-distance charges, you restricted your online presence to boards that could be reached via your local phone exchange.
I know this might be hard to imagine for people who grew up with the Internet. But it really was a
very different world back then. So much so that when I look back on it, I'm amazed I'm still walking on the same planet.
As far as software went, most authors were very good at supporting their "product." Those that wanted to make some money usually opted for releasing their work as shareware. Shareware was basically an honor system. If you liked and continued to use something, you were supposed to pay the requested license fee.
Freeware was
freeware. Notable examples of quality freeware were: FidoBBS, RBBS-PC, QModem, and (later on) DR-DOS.
Commercial software was usually copy protected so there was no confusion about the fact you were supposed to pay to use it. The biggies back then were Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, XYWrite, DBaseIII & IV, Clipper, Foxbase, RBase, Borland's TurboPascal, Paradox, and Sidekick, HarvardGraphics, and a host of others.
For the most part, what we'd categorize as "office productivity" apps today, were
all commercial software - although PC-Calc and PC-Write were popular shareware alternatives.
Most of the communication software (terminal emulators, modem tools, mail clients, chat tools, etc.) that was worth using was all freeware or shareware. There were commercial offerings out there. But everybody pretty much standardized on QModem for logging onto bulletin boards.
BBS software was mostly free. Fido was the dominant force out there since it had a rudimentary e-mail network routing system that allowed messages to be sent free of charge by doing a sort of bucket brigade store & forward (albeit via dialup) that anticipated some of the technology found in our current messaging protocols. Check out wikipedia if you're interested in the details.
If you want to have a real chuckle, and possibly gain some insight into how things used to be, check out these two historic vids over at YouTube:
Connect: A Look At Bulletin Board Systems
BBS The Documentary 
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