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In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

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Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#61

Post by colkassad »

coreyh14444 wrote: post #11

I definitely had cassette based games on the TRS-80, but most of the "wireless" transmission in my youth was via BASIC printed in the back of computer magazines. You had to type in the entire app yourself. I did this for basically every app they listed. Sometimes it was like tax prep software, but I didn't care, even though I was like 9 at the time. Yes, it took a very long time. Yes, you could easily introduce typos…

I did the same with an Atari 400 that had a cassette tape. I remember it would take 30 minutes or so to load/save games I copied from magazines. The keyboard was torture. I then moved on to very rudimentary text adventures of my own once I felt a bit comfortable with BASIC. I'm very glad my father bought that for me...he was a painter and we didn't have a lot of money then. It was extremely formative.

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#62

Post by nonrandomstring »

mysterydip wrote: post #14
coreyh14444 wrote: post #11

I definitely had cassette based games on the TRS-80, but most of the "wireless" transmission in my youth was via BASIC printed in the back of computer magazines. You had to type in the entire app yourself. I did this for basically every app they listed. Sometimes it was like tax prep software, but I didn't care, even though I was like 9 at the time. Yes, it took a very long time. Yes, you could easily introduce typos…

Sometimes the typos were in the magazine itself, and you wouldn't figure out the problem with the code you triple-checked you typed in properly until the errata in next month's issue :)

Also typeset in a non-fixed width font with long lines truncated to fit the copy layout!

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#63

Post by theginger »

Something I also remember from tv was what I think they called data bursts, at the end of certain TV shows they would play a few seconds of still frames full of information, like flicking through a magazine in 10 seconds. You would record this on a VCR and play it back frame by frame, occasionally it included some computer code to manually type in, it was pretty terrible because paused video frames tended to be a bit unstable.

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#65

Post by jpalomaki »

pknerd wrote: post #64

My brain is unable to grasp it..How does it work and at what speed things used to get downloaded?

Regular audio cassettes were also used as storage medium for software. Distributing over radio just mean playing these tapes. And people could then record the broadcast at home and load the software from cassette.

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#66

Post by bmacho »

flohofwoe wrote: post #50
ohgr wrote: post #31

I pirated music from the radio too!

Nitpick: It's not 'pirating' when it's for your own use, only when you 'distribute' it to others. Of course nobody cared either way ;)

Distributing later would be Robin-Hooding. Pirating is for personal gain

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#67

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

bpoyner wrote: post #25

This is great and I believe it. But saying your game would be loaded "after a few minutes" might be true for a small game. I had the Commodore 1541 floppy drive while my friend had the Commodore Datasette. The speed difference between these were huge. The floppy drive was around 300 bytes per second while the tape drive was around 50 bytes per second (3KB/minute). We would literally go outside to play while waiting o…

300 Bps is demon speed! I remember using an acoustic coupler to access the early internet at 300 BAUD (i.e. 300 bps), or about 30 char/sec.

Later on, I also remember downloading Linux kernel tarballs, hot off the press, via FTP using 9600 bps modem (if I recall correctly - slow as crap), which I'd kick off before going to bed and hope for the best in the morning. Sometimes I'd make a script to download a few different files at once.

On the theme of slow computing in general, I remember doing embedded software builds on a PDP 11 (Xenix) that would take an hour or so to complete - so you'd go and practice your juggling or somesuch waiting for it to complete.

Still, the big thrill in mid-late 70's had been the switch from batch punched card deck submissions to a mainframe (an hour later comeback to collect the syntax error, or core dump printout) to being ONLINE (woo hoo!) - sitting in front of a terminal and actually interacting with a computer in real time!

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#69

Post by gizajob »

pknerd wrote: post #64

My brain is unable to grasp it..How does it work and at what speed things used to get downloaded?

This is the “loading” of the classic ZX Spectrum computer game Manic Miner coded by programming genius Mathew Smith. The data is converted into audio and sold on cassette tapes. Instead of a disk drive, you would plug in an audio cassette tape player into the ZX Spectrum computer and “play” the sound into the computer, which would then read this audio as data and use it to load the game into memory, after which it could then be played. So instead of distributing the audio as cassette, in this case that same audio is broadcast over the radio and people would record it from the radio onto a cassette tape. Then playing the cassette into the computer would load (“download”) the game into the machine. Primitive but it works, and what we had to put up with.

Imagine being six years old and wanting to play Manic Miner, and having to sit there for 6 minutes while your TV did this before you could play the game:

https://youtu.be/kHn_BvTBALI?si=5CrKYa6DlNZTN7In

(Please watch in full without doing anything else or scrolling for the authentic experience)

Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

#70

Post by jonwinstanley »

mysterydip wrote: post #14
coreyh14444 wrote: post #11

I definitely had cassette based games on the TRS-80, but most of the "wireless" transmission in my youth was via BASIC printed in the back of computer magazines. You had to type in the entire app yourself. I did this for basically every app they listed. Sometimes it was like tax prep software, but I didn't care, even though I was like 9 at the time. Yes, it took a very long time. Yes, you could easily introduce typos…

Sometimes the typos were in the magazine itself, and you wouldn't figure out the problem with the code you triple-checked you typed in properly until the errata in next month's issue :)

The compiler/interpreter couldn’t even tell you what line the error was on!

You’d just get a big error message for the whole program.

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