Coincidently, downloading anything from wi-fi or cellular network is exactly the same thing. Just on steroids.
Remember when you could "hear" cellular transmission when you moved a cell phone too close to a speaker? That was cool/annoying.
In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio
81–90 of 153 posts
Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio
#82My brain is unable to grasp it..How does it work and at what speed things used to get downloaded?
More or less just like Wi-Fi.
Your wi-fi access point takes electrical signals coming from something else, like a router, and turns them into radio waves that are captured by the antenna on your phone or computer. This is, then, fed to the Wi-Fi controller on your phone or computer which translates these transmissions back into electrical signals.
Loads of math are involved in getting it right, but that's the gist of it.
Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio
#83I 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…
Doing this is one of my earliest memories. I think I was 5 or 6. I hadn't even mastered reading yet and I was typing a game into an IBM XT clone (think it was QBasic) one character at a time. Don't think I would have bothered with a tax prep program, though. Now that's dedication.
Edit: Could not have been QBasic as it wasn't released until 1991 and I was doing this in 1987-1988. So maybe GW Basic? Whatever came standard on an IBM XT clone from Taiwan.
Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio
#84There are websites with WAV files of software cassettes. You can connect the audio out of your cellphone to the cassette input of your Apple ][ and load audio directly from the web.
Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio
#85I played games on a Commodore 64 from cassette tapes, in principal you could record games onto a blank cassette but it was very flaky. Good times though.
I did this all the time... even used a double cassette deck to make copies... azimuth was the problem if the heads were aligned different.. so you used a small screwdriver and the top of the cassette had a small opening, this is where you had to align the heads by listening till it didn't sound distorted.. fun times See also https://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/2016/11/what-was-first-co...
From what I remember I had a decent amount of success copying games using a twin tape deck for my amstrad 464. I ended up passing on the amstrad to a colleague over a decade ago, who since moved to the US and is almost certainly on here. If you see this Jim, I found the manual!
Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio
#86There are websites with WAV files of software cassettes. You can connect the audio out of your cellphone to the cassette input of your Apple ][ and load audio directly from the web. https://asciiexpress.net/gameserver/readme.html
Ah, the retro equivalent of "curl -L | bash" ... :)
Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio
#87The transmissions from NOS in The Netherlands could be received here in Denmark, and I actually succeeded in downloading several programs based on the BASICODE 2 standard. At that time (eighties), people had all sorts of home computers, but this way we could actually run the same programs, whether you had a BBC computer, a ZX81 or one of the many other brands. The way it worked was that the programs used a common (pr…
Here is an example of the sound that was heard on the radio for approximately 2 to 3 minutes that was broadcasted on the Dutch radio. https://on.soundcloud.com/QAUa2Kkgef1gDxDQ6
To my ear it sounds like AFSK, kind of like the Bell 202 scheme. Here's the first passable search result I found with a clean recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PXxSHGrF-8
Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio
#88Coincidently, downloading anything from wi-fi or cellular network is exactly the same thing. Just on steroids.
Remember when you could "hear" cellular transmission when you moved a cell phone too close to a speaker? That was cool/annoying.
My grandparents - sometime in the '80s - had an early-model cordless phone. It was a lovely object: the ivory-colored plastic handset was a smooth curve, with no sharp edges. Being able to talk on the phone from the backyard was magic! It had just enough range that my grandmother could carry on a conversation throughout her daily circumnavigation of the house to turn on the sprinklers.
Sometime after they got it, so did their next-door neighbors (not necessarily the same model: they weren't - irony! - on speaking terms), and then sometimes you'd pick up the handset and find yourself eavesdropping on both sides of the neighbor's phone call. Fortunately, the manufacturer had anticipated this: there was a three-position frequency-selection switch on the side. (I can't remember if the base station hopped to whatever you set on the handset, or if you had to set it manually on the base, too.) That worked fine for a while, we used frequency #2, the neighbors used... one of the others, until (I assume - we never heard anyone else's calls) a further-away neighbor or two also got a cordless phone, and the next-door folks had to frequency hop.
They put up with that for a while, and then sadly reverted to corded phones until more-advanced cordless tech became available.
Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio
#89I 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…
The german C64 magazine "64er" had an application which allowed "easy" entry of assembly applications by means of a hex encoding and used a checksum on each line to prevent bugs from typos. Still an incredible chore.
It was called "checksummer" which is a funny pun on check sum and "summer" which is the German word for buzzer. Oh, I should add that it made an annoying buzzer sound when you made a mistake.
Re: In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio
#90We downloaded from the radio and copied with our cheap Japanese ghetto blasters[1]. It was the easiest and fastest way.
[1] We used to use the term "boombox" but I am afraid no one still knows that term, so ghetto blaster it is.