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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

#101

Post by aaronbaugher »

jonwinstanley wrote: post #70
mysterydip wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

After a while, magazines like Commodore Run and Compute started including a short program that would checksum each line as you entered it, so you could check that against a checksum in the magazine. Of course, you had to get that program typed in correctly first before you could use it to enter others.

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

#102

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

kragen wrote: post #94
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BBS had been available from late 70's - initially using acoustic couplers rather than modems. The internet (as distinct from ARPANET) wasn't created until early 80's, and what most people today think of as the internet - the WWW - wasn't publicly available until the early 90's.

Well, I investigated, and I was wrong. BBSes did predate the internet—but not, as you say, by several years. Rather, the time gap was about six to ten months, because the internet (as distinct from ARPANET) was created in late 01978, not the early 01980s. (Also, we didn't use acoustic couplers instead of modems; modems were what we were coupling with our acoustic couplers.) Ward Christensen and Randy Suess put the fi…

> But presumably nobody that ignorant is participating in this discussion.

Perhaps not, but maybe not even fair to categorize it as ignorance. Many techies will have only grown up in the web era and therefore think that web-pages and smartphone apps are the internet. How many have used an NNTP client, or even know what one was.

Are you a bot? Your response and five-digit dates are distinctly odd ...

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

#103

Post by smilespray »

ochrist wrote: post #19

The 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…

You with your fancy GOSUB-supporting computer...

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

#104

Post by microtonal »

Modern counterpart: the Teenage Engineering PO-32 drum machine can get samples/patches through it's mic or line-in. Some people have Youtube videos with patches in them. E.g. here is a playlist where each video has a section with patch transfer (sounds like an old modem):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbD49LoIZ_0&list=PLk5kr7-twZ...

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

#105

Post by kragen »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #102
kragen wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I investigated, and I was wrong. BBSes did predate the internet—but not, as you say, by several years. Rather, the time gap was about six to ten months, because the internet (as distinct from ARPANET) was created in late 01978, not the early 01980s. (Also, we didn't use acoustic couplers instead of modems; modems were what we were coupling with our acoustic couplers.) Ward Christensen and Randy Suess put the fi…

> But presumably nobody that ignorant is participating in this discussion. Perhaps not, but maybe not even fair to categorize it as ignorance. Many techies will have only grown up in the web era and therefore think that web-pages and smartphone apps are the internet. How many have used an NNTP client, or even know what one was. Are you a bot? Your response and five-digit dates are distinctly odd ...

Someone who doesn't know the difference between the WWW and the internet isn't yet a "techie". At some point in your journey to being a techie, you have to notice that when your home internet connection goes out or your Android is on a network that "can't provide IP", you can't connect to Minecraft servers, make calls on a SIP phone, torrent, chat on WhatsApp, or play Xbox Live.

I'm not a bot.

It is true that it would be more normal to respond to your comment with personal attacks or poorly thought out non sequiturs rather than reading through meeting notes from the late 01970s to find out what the truth was, then admitting I was wrong.

This abnormality is why people often respond to my HN comments by saying things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43494574: "This kind of comment is the reason I come to HN. Thank you for taking the time to share your knowledge with us."

I wish more people were abnormal in this way.

Normality is by definition mediocre; excellence is therefore both abnormal and an act of dissent, conscious or unconscious. Dare to be abnormal.

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

#106

Post by esafak »

pknerd wrote: post #64

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

The data is encoded in subtle shifts in the frequency. This is a type of modulation. Look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_modulation and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-shift_keying

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

#107

Post by ztetranz »

section_me wrote: post #45
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…

The post man always bent our magazine and pushed it in the cat flap making the included disk useless (even though it was clearly marked "DO NOT BEND!"), so I remember having to type everything out and sometimes correct the typos introduced into the print version. Fun times.

Floppy disks DO NOT BEND!

Oh yes they do.

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

#108

Post by koonsolo »

Joeboy wrote: post #16

From my subjective experience, having "been there at the time", I think this was sufficiently obscure that "not really a thing" is not an unreasonable take. It's a bit like "Yes, in the 2020s we got NFTs tattooed on our bodies". Edit: Although having just googled it it seems like NFT tattoos might be more of a thing than I was aware, so what do I know.

It's probably obscure, but anyone from that time would find it plausible because we know both radio and computers used cassettes.

So for me, this title was "Yeah, I get it how that would work".

For fun I just asked my 16 year old son "Do you think it was possible in the past to download a computer game from the radio?". He thought is was impossible, and had no clue how that would work when asked further :D. It totally confused him because "you can't play games on a radio".

Those were indeed different times.

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

#109

Post by drivers99 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #102
kragen wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I investigated, and I was wrong. BBSes did predate the internet—but not, as you say, by several years. Rather, the time gap was about six to ten months, because the internet (as distinct from ARPANET) was created in late 01978, not the early 01980s. (Also, we didn't use acoustic couplers instead of modems; modems were what we were coupling with our acoustic couplers.) Ward Christensen and Randy Suess put the fi…

> But presumably nobody that ignorant is participating in this discussion. Perhaps not, but maybe not even fair to categorize it as ignorance. Many techies will have only grown up in the web era and therefore think that web-pages and smartphone apps are the internet. How many have used an NNTP client, or even know what one was. Are you a bot? Your response and five-digit dates are distinctly odd ...

On 5-digit years and Y10K compliance https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...

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

#110

Post by forestgreen76 »

nunez wrote: post #77

Insane that there are people denying that this happened. I wasn't born during this period, but being able to download stuff off of terrestrial radio is completely believable. What do people think Wi-Fi or cellular networks are???

For real. It's really not that much of a stretch.
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