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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

#121

Post by bluedino »

Mid-90's in the United States...

Somehow I bought a Hauppauge TV tuner card, it may have been this one:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/325897614012

"Receive data broadcasts with Intercast and Wavetop"

Now, I don't remember anything I specifically downloaded using this. I'm not sure if it was still being used at the time, or if it was even supported in my area. I picked the tuner card up at a surplus store and it was at least a year or two old at that time.

I remember you needed to use a certain application and images or websites or something would appear in a browser while you were watching a TV show.

Edit: Intel Intercast, apparently

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercast#:~:text=Intercast%20...

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

#122

Post by jandrese »

atoav wrote: post #53

I know audio gear that does firmware updates via audio input. The most obscure thing I have ever seen is a device that received firmware updates by strobing the bits as light into a photodiode. You would go to a website on your phone, press upload and hold the phone in front of the thing.

There was a brief period during the late 90s/early 2000s before WiFi became ubiquitous that laptops came with IR transmitters/receivers for streaming data.

It was always touchy, slow, required an unbroken line of sight, and poorly supported by both the OS and application software, but I did make it work a couple of times. The PDAs of the time used a similar technology to send contact information (business cards) between devices.

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

#123

Post by moreati »

aaronbaugher wrote: post #101
jonwinstanley wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Semi related, I created linesum a few years back https://github.com/moreati/linesum to line by line sha256.

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

#124

Post by nocman »

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 ones I did this from were "Compute!" and "Compute's Gazette! (for Commodore 64 and VIC-20)". They were all octal numbers, if I remember correctly, and the last number in each row was a checksum. I also paid my sister to type in some of them in for me. A lot of them were games, but there were also some very useful programs in there. I spent so many late nights typing away on that 8-bit machine. It was a cool time to be a kid who was interested in computers.

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

#125

Post by ben7799 »

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…

This is what I had to do. It was probably beneficial. I was pretty young.. 10-12? My dad is also an engineer and would help me debug the programs after I typed them in, teaching me BASIC as we went. I wasn't necessarily able to understand it all but it probably built me a foundation for programming no different than introducing children to a 2nd language earlier rather than later.

There were also books I checked out of the library. These sometimes presented additional difficulties as we didn't have a computer powerful enough to take advantage of everything in the book, or had a completely wrong environment.

I must have been weirdly motivated but in some way I think this was better than the way everything is spoonfed and easy for kids today if they want it? My son is not motivated the same way, it's just too easy to go over to a game or something else that's less challenging. Quite a few of my friends who also became software engineers/computer scientists had a very similar experience in the late 80s and early 90s.

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

#126

Post by ben7799 »

microtonal wrote: post #104

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...

This is actually more common than we might think in the music world. TC Electronic and a few other guitar/effect companies also had audio based ways to transmit program data into effects pedals.

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

#127

Post by kotor »

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 :)

My exact memory. When you did finally get everything correct, the program could take 15 minutes to load from the cassette tape. I remember upgrading my Commodore 64 with a floppy disk and loading programs in 2 minutes (which felt instantaneous by comparison).

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

#128

Post by ben7799 »

nunez wrote: post #81
giusc wrote: post #76

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.

This still works if you get your phone too close to an electric guitar!

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

#129

Post by ryoshu »

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…

Main way I learned how to program was computer magazines and copying code. I still do things like redrawing reference architecture diagrams from scratch, because I can focus on each portion and think about how the data flows between services.

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

#130

Post by onre »

tantalor wrote: post #117
aaronbaugher wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm curious, can you say more about "as you entered it"? Do you mean like, "for lines 1-20 the checksum should be 0xDEADBEEF"? This would let you find the error before finishing the program. Or just at the end, it would checksum the whole thing?

I remember borrowing a book from the library, which had a type-in checksum program of this sort. It was done like was common for C=64 things of this kind - there's a BASIC FOR-loop iterating through a memory area, reading in bytes from DATA statements you've typed in and POKEing those bytes into memory, not completely unlike entering a program manually from the front-panel switches of an older computer.

So, after typing that in and probably SYSing (C=64 BASIC command for executing machine code from arbitrary memory location) to some address, it did print out a two-digit (eight-bit) hex checksum after every BASIC line I entered on the C=64 and the program listing in the book had the correct checksums for every line, so spotting errors was more or less instantaneous.

This stuff brings memories.

  FOR I=40960 TO 49152:POKE I,PEEK(I):NEXT I
  POKE 1,54
From top of my head; loop through the BASIC interpreter area, reading byte by byte with PEEK and POKEing those bytes back to the same addresses. Sounds nonsensical? Not so, because the C=64 does have full 64 kB of RAM, but some of it is overlapped by ROMs. What happens here is that you're reading from ROM but writes always go to RAM, so you're copying the BASIC interpreter from ROM to RAM. After that, the POKE statement turns off the ROM overlap and the interpreter is now run from RAM, so you can edit it live - and obviously cause all sorts of interesting crash situations.

It sure did help later with career in IT to have understood this kind of stuff at age of around ten.

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