As a result of the attendance and hard work of such industry leaders as Jim "Button" Knopf and Bob Wallace and many others, the Association of Shareware Professionals was created in 1987.

One of Nelson Ford's interest in the HAL-PC user group was swapping public domain and shareware software with other members.

He eventually created a large, organized library of programs and his group made copies for other members for a disk fee.

When people around the world were not able to get programs discussed in the column because they lacked economical access to bulletin board systems, they wrote to Nelson Ford asking for copies, which he also made for a disk fee.

Programmers who learned of the service sent their software to PsL to be added to the library, eventually at the rate of hundreds of programs a month.

As the CD-ROM and the Internet took over, these disk vendors died out, thus leaving PsL the first (1980) and most likely the very last (1997) company to distribute shareware on diskettes.

In the late 1980s, PsL initiated an order-processing service for shareware authors in which live operators took orders over the phone at toll-free numbers.

This was not an easy service to provide as banks were reluctant to give credit card merchant accounts to mail- or phone-order businesses.

With the growth of the Internet, by 1998, the distribution of shareware by disk and CD-ROM was beginning to wane while order processing was booming, and with 13+ years of 100-hour work weeks taking their toll on Nelson and Kay Ford, they sold PsL to Digital River, Inc., an NYSE-listed, online-order-processing company, and retired.