How did people get apps on their computer before the Internet?

From my personal experiences these 20 something years ago, we were getting software mainly from variety of computer and gaming magazines releasing often on monthly cycle, coming with CDs. These were packed with freeware, shareware, trials and sometimes full versions. And if you got large circle of friends you could swap these CDs in kinda offline P2P way. If you were really lucky there was someone who had already broadband connection and you could ask for a favor. Internet Cafes were also a thing back then - you could burn stuff on CDs or come with your own HDDs; and people did, sometimes clogging whole connection with P2P programs.

I had a Commodore 64 back in the early 80s, in the Seattle area. For a time, I typed in stuff from books and magazines and saved them to tape. Got a diskette drive, but it broke. For a while, I had only the cassette drive again, and actually purchased a tape with Microprose's Silent Service from a supplier in England (this kind of software on cassette was virtually unheard of in the US by that time). It took weeks to arrive, but kept me going for months!

I typed in the Speedscript word processor from Compute! magazine. Each line had a checksum at the end, I think I got it right the first time. It was by far the best word processor available for the C-64 at the time.

My timeline.

Early 80s. Typing in BASIC programs from monthly magazines and saving them on magnetic tape (standard cassettes, short ones because you don't want to go to the end of a C90 even with fast forward).

Late 80s. Floppy disks.

Early 90s. Mostly floppy disks (eg Slackware Linux!) and some CDs but I had Internet at university since January 1st 1990 so I had Usenet and FTP there. Not at home and no portable computer.

Mid 90s. DVDs, but they were mostly to backup data, music and movies.

Then Internet at work -> CDs -> my computer.

Then Internet at home and we got out of scope for OP's question.

Floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and .zip files downloaded from BBSes and services like CompuServe. Ah, I sometimes miss the ol' days of shareware/freeware ...

Usenet - there was a whole comp.sources.* hierarchy, not to mention the OS specific forums. All those sources lost in time like years in rain.

A friend of mine typed in a BASIC tic tac toe game from a book, circa 1975. This was on a Honeywell 1640 at Northeast Missouri State University.

You could also play 3-D tic tac toe, crash a lunar lander, and play some pest-and-pesticide game. I think those were loaded from card decks that the data center staff surreptitiously copied on visits to other installations.

Floppy disks and CDs

BBS's, Floppys in computer magazines, Online services AOL/Compuserve/Geocities, also local computer stores sold shareware\software.

I so miss CompUSA, they had entire rows of games, took the kids on weekends to pick out a game and new hardware. Good times.

Paper tape on a Teletype ASR33.

Dial up modems and BBSs