cassettes are a bit before my time. I am personally unaware of any "shovelware" being distributed via cassette; i have heard that radio stations would broadcast programs you could record and play back (i remember Acorn in this particular story, i think.)

And floppies, sure, the 3.5" ones had some shovelware, included in trade magazines and whatnot. Maybe someone has a directory listing of a floppy from this era showing what it was like, i'd be interested; i know about AOL disks, too.

But CD-ROM. never before could humans distribute 200 games / software packages so easily. my first computer with a cd-rom had a hard disk 350MB larger than a CD-ROM. 2 shovelware CD-ROMs was more than my PC could handle!