
How People Used to Download Games from the Radio (2014) - panic
http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2014/10/13/people-used-download-games-radio
======
russellbeattie
When I was a kid with my TRS-80 Color Computer, there were computer magazines
that had plastic "records" as inserts with programs on them [1]. You could
snap out the thin plastic disk and play it on your record player so you could
record it to a cassette tape to load onto your computer.

I never got it to work, because the programs were (mostly) for Commodore
computers. Didn't stop me from trying. Also tried to make my own "modem" by
connecting wires from the serial port directly to an old phone. (No schematics
or anything... Just red to red, blue to blue, etc.) Looking back, it would
have been nice to have had an adult around to help me out a bit.

Considering the crackles, pops, etc. that are normal audio artifacts of record
players, I'd be surprised if the records worked for anyone, actually.

1\.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc)

~~~
sundvor
That's nice! On a related note, I just recalled the magazines with code
listings in them - pages upon pages.

And yes, I would spend hours typing them all in. Even before I got my tape
drive. :p

~~~
zimpenfish
> And yes, I would spend hours typing them all in.

You'd get 90% of the way through and someone walking down the next road would
cause the RAM pack to wobble and your Spectrum / ZX81 would reset itself. Or
it'd be a page of hex printed at 72dpi dark grey on black 6pt font and you'd
misread one of the Es as an F and nothing would work but you'd spend hours
trying to figure out which one it was.

Ah, kids of today, they've got it easy.

~~~
sundvor
Aye sir, I laughed with familiarity! Yet we didn't have social media, so I
guess that they can't have it both ways.

------
hanoz
Thanks. What a lovely nostalgia trip!

Ways of 'downloading' in my childhood, in decreasing order of unreliability:

* Via the television, holding a cassette recorder microphone to the tele speaker, after staying up till after midnight to catch it.

* Buying a magazine with a bendy plastic 45 record stuck to the cover and playing it on a record player, again probably using the microphone because you didn't have the right leads.

* From the radio. Woohoo, straight to the integrated cassette recorder. Although even then I don't think I ever got even that to work. Mind you it was pretty hit and miss loading an 'original' tape on the ZX Spectrum.

* Typing it in from a magazine. It took an afternoon, but at least you got to correct your mistakes. Unless it was a particularly crashy mistake.

And, wow, out out nowhere I've suddenly recalled having one of my own, a
wordsearch solver, published in one of them. My first upload! Those were the
days, I'm welling up!

~~~
PeterStuer
Oh, those dodgy copies of black dots on silver thermal paper scrolls they
copied into the those Spectrum magazines. Good times, but not for that reason
:D

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Printer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Printer)

~~~
zimpenfish
And now people are hawking essentially those same printers (albeit with less
shiny paper) as "Personal Bluetooth Printers" for ££. The world of technology
is bonkers.

------
rustcharm
One of my first experiences with microcomputer hobbyists was in 1977 when I
heard someone call in to WBAI late at night and playing music generated from
his TRS-80 over the radio. He used the radio frequency interference from the
computer to make signals that were picked up by an AM radio. Then he held the
phone to his radio when he called in to WBAI to demonstrate.

After that the radio host was intrigued, and the caller said he could play the
program over the radio, too, so people with TRS-80s could record the program
and load it into their computer. So for the next few minutes over New York's
WBAI, listeners heard the sounds of a TRS-80 cassette program being broadcast
over the air.

I was so interested in these computers that I did some sleuthing and found the
caller, Nat, who introduced me into an entire seedy underworld of phone
phreaks, hams, pirate radio station operators, and electronics hackers. Back
in these days, my parents didn't think it was odd for a 14 year old kid to
hang out with people in their 20s and beyond. And that's how my 35+ year
career in computers and electronics, in New York, Silicon Valley, and Israel,
started.

------
sundvor
That brings back memories long forgotten. I'm never going to miss my Vic20/C64
tape drives, ever.

Except when I first got my Vic20 as a child the tape drive was half a year
away. When I got it: Pure bliss. I could _save_ my programs.

In a weird way I feel sorry for my son who never gets to experience such
wonders. But then again maybe it is just good that IT will never again be the
obscure, ostracised (from a child's popularity in social groups point of view)
thing it once was.

~~~
gerdesj
"I'm never going to miss my Vic20/C64 tape drives, ever."

I recently had my childhood C64 fixed up by one of my employees (turns out
they are good for something). It now has virtually every game released on a SD
Card via a rather modern interface to the cartridge slot. This beast used to
have a floppy drive and I remember how amazing that was compared to the tape
drive.

------
flohofwoe
There's a fascinating report about how Dr. Horst Voelz (the most popular
computer scientist in Eastern Germany) for the first time in 1987 (edit: 1986)
sent BASIC programs "illegally" (meaning without notifying government
officials) in a live broadcast from his living room on the GDR "national
school radio", which quickly became the most popular radio show in Eastern
Germany (the all-in-all 60 radio shows received 50,000 letters which was
unheard of), all despite attempts from the Ministry of Education to shut it
down.

Here's the PDF of the report written by Dr.Voelz himself:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20181107231024/http://r-h-
voelz....](https://web.archive.org/web/20181107231024/http://r-h-
voelz.de/PDF%20sonstige/ComputerSendungen.pdf)

------
z2
Reminds me of a system Nintendo endorsed in the 90s using satellite radio as a
subscription for games and related broadcasts. I'm surprised such a niche like
add-on gained so much traction to last 5 years!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview)

~~~
umvi
I saw a video recently where someone got Slack working on a SNES using that:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwXY2raEzPk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwXY2raEzPk)

~~~
YaxelPerez
HN Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18257811](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18257811)

------
sehugg
This is a good time to link to Apple Disk Server, which supplies audio files
that Apple ][s can load with their built-in cassette ROM routines,
bootstrapping a program that loads a compressed image, then formats and writes
it to floppy disk:
[http://asciiexpress.net/diskserver/](http://asciiexpress.net/diskserver/)

( This is one of the few ways to transfer data to a vintage computer without
additional hardware, at least until devices started showing up without a
headphone jack :^P )

I added a similar feature to my 8bitworkshop IDE that lets you upload your own
C/asm programs to your Apple ][ via cassette port:
[http://8bitworkshop.com/v3.2.0/?platform=apple2](http://8bitworkshop.com/v3.2.0/?platform=apple2)

------
tluyben2
Basicode was quite a thing in the Netherlands when I was young; it is a BASIC
dialect which is cross platform, which was quite a thing in those days. You
had a 'library' of common subroutines which were above line 1000 (10000?)
which you gosub'ed to. Also it defined the sounds to use for storing &
transmitting so it was cross platform.

Basicode programs came on cassette, floppy disk, records (not vinyl, but
flexible plastic you put on your record player and play once or twice only to
get the program off and then store it on cassette or floppy), magazines (you
had to type it in yourself) and radio. There were multiple weekly programs
that sent over Basicode.

I used to get them and put them on my BBS if I didn't get them elsewhere yet.

~~~
eponeponepon
A lot of countries had their own educational computers for a while - like the
BBC in the UK.

I wonder if there's lingistic study that could be done on modern programmers
working in today's standardised languages that could identify differences in
their coding style stemming from the local language they played with at
school.

------
Angostura
Pete Shelley's XL 1 album came with a final track on the album that was a
programme for the ZX Spectrum. You ran the programme while playing the song
and it would play visuals that (roughly) went with the music and display the
lyrics.

Here you go:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMtJjeX5UMk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMtJjeX5UMk)

------
altitudinous
They did this in New Zealand, and I hauled a tape deck out to the garage to
record it as Mum wouldn't have that loud screeching in the house.

I never got a single recording to work on my computer. Never would even find
the program let alone load it.

------
brian-armstrong
Shameless plug: If you want to try out a modem in your browser, check out
[https://quiet.github.io/quiet-js](https://quiet.github.io/quiet-js)

------
jamesgeck0
The Nintendo DS game _Bangai-O Spirits_ did something similar to allow copying
user-created levels between game systems.

Turns out that there was a vulnerability in the transmission format, so this
can also be used as a way of running unsigned code on the DS.

[https://hackaday.com/2014/12/31/running-nintendo-ds-
unsigned...](https://hackaday.com/2014/12/31/running-nintendo-ds-unsigned-
code-with-audio/)

------
whoopdedo
The legacy of loading programs from audio sources can be seen in the PS/2
keyboard connector. The 6-pin Mini-DIN was chosen as a more compact
alternative to the 5/180 DIN used for the PC-AT keyboard. There was another of
the same type of connector on that computer for hooking up a cassette recorder
as it was a standard for audio equipment going back to the 60's. It was also
re-purposed as the standard MIDI connector.

------
DEADBEEFC0FFEE
Just posting to say Me Too! Those were such exciting times!

I recently tried to explain some of this period to my kids and did poorly.

It does make me wonder if every period has these exciting times and are also
hard to relate to future people. We get a very low fidelity recounting of
history compared to real life.

------
aidenn0
ATSC has a data rate of about 20MBit/s net of FEC (it transmits 2 data bits
for every signal bit at 32mbit/s). That works out to 9GB/hour or 15MB per
minute. Might be able to do some cool things with that during the late hours.

~~~
G4BB3R
Do you mean 150MB per minute? That's impressive. Few years ago I didn't had
this.

~~~
aidenn0
no 15 Mega _bytes_ per minute which is 20 mega _bits_ per second.

------
reaperducer
They had these programs in the United States, too. Usually very late at night
on stations with powerful signals.

It's been a long time, but I believe the one that carried it in New York was
WNBC (now WFAN).

------
osi1647
I remember my neighbour recording radio broadcasts for his Commodore 64. One
glitch in the broadcast because of some noise on the antenna and the program
failed to run :P

------
maljx
We used to copy C64 digital tapes on a double cassette deck, using analog
copy, running at double speed. Most times it worked, sometimes not.

------
blowski
I’m amazed by this. I would have thought quality of radio was so low that the
program would be unrecoverably corrupted.

~~~
adrianmonk
Back in those days, cassette equipment could be loosely divided into two
categories: (1) hifi equipment for listening to music and (2) voice quality
battery operated portable cassette recorders with a handle and a built-in
speaker. (Walkman and knockoffs also existed as kind of a hybrid of these
two.)

There were also hifi and voice quality categories of blank cassette tapes.

The voice quality stuff was generally good enough for 8-bit computers.

FM radio was probably somewhere between the two, at least given good
conditions. So it seems like it would have worked fine. I never tried it
myself. I did hear a news story about it, but it never became available in my
area.

~~~
handelaar
I saw the comment in the article about FM being less reliable and my brain
went immediately to "yup, that'll be the compressor"

------
jamespo
I could never get these recorded basicode downloads to work on my vic-20

------
Tade0
My father used to "download" things this way. Unfortunately given the poor
quality of cassettes in communist countries rarely anything arrived in one
piece.

