EDUCORP Catalog
In the early 1990's there were three ways to get shareware software; Bulletin Board Services, Computer Societies such as Boston Computer Society and catalog companies such as Educorp. Catalog companies were a popular choice because people didn't have to use dial up to download software.
One of the most popular companies was EDUCORP. Every year they would mail a catalog of the currently available disk packages. I still have the 9th Edition, which is 347 pages longs and distributed in early 1990. This is the "About Us" information that they have in their catalog:
Who we are and What we do
We are EDUCORP, a division of Gazelle Technologies, Inc. Our goal is to provide high-quality public domain and Shareware software at almost-free prices. We also sell CD-ROM drives, our entire library of software on our highly-rated EDUCORP CD-ROM, as well as many other CD_ROM titles. We have very low prices on blank SONY disks, computer accessories, and commercial software. This catalog describes and illustrates over 550 disks packed with over 9,500 programs at very low prices. Our prices start at $6.99 and go down the more you buy, as low as $2.49.
Here's a sample of one of their packages from the 9th Edition: 2110 - Utilities, Volume 6 - which featured AutoBlack, CLIM, CursorWrap, DTStartup, FaceLift, Forked Tongue, Gone Fishing, Hyper, Immortality, Initializer, JClock, Layout, MacProtect, MacSnoop Demo, MacWait, Nest, Preview, ReMountHD20, ResPreloader, ReverseScreen, RAMTest, SkipStartup, StartMac, SysAlerts, TEXT Ranger, UDS/M, Verify.
This is a screenshot of part of page 41 in the catalog, click on the image to see the full page view, I highlighted some of the application names because I was interested in that software:
One of the downsides of ordering from EDUCORP was that you didn't always know what you were getting and had to rely on the brief description to convince you that it was a disk worth ordering. They did a good job with combining common shareware packages.
I can't find any information on when EDUCORP closed it doors, but I am sure it was the results of how easy it was to get shareware from AOL and other online providers. Today it's a lot easier to get Macintosh shareware software via the MacUpdate, Tucows.com, macshareware.com, Pure Mac and many more.