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In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

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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 and bugs.

6 days agoby coreyh14444

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.

6 days agoby Joeboy

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 (primitive) BASIC dialect, and where there was a difference, a subroutine was added with a high line number. E.g. instead of clear screen you would just write GOSUB 100. There's a user manual here: https://archive.org/details/BASICODE2Manual/page/n7/mode/2up

6 days agoby ochrist

We also downloaded software from our TV's in the UK via the BBC micro's Prestel adaptor.

A much more mainstream way of sharing software was source code listings - typically BASIC - in magazines like Dr. Dobbs, that you would type in yourself.

I wonder how many of today's youth are also aware of the bulletin board systems (BBS) that existed pre-internet - standalone servers that you would connect to via modem to socialize and/or download files using protocols like Kermit, and X/Y/Zmodem.

6 days agoby HarHarVeryFunny

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...

6 days agoby danieldk

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???

6 days agoby nunez

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...

6 days agoby bluedino

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 on the tape drive.

6 days agoby bpoyner

Here's a personal record of Prof Dr Horst Völz (basically the figure head of East German hobby computing) about his computer radio show which featured such downloads over radio (in German):

https://web.archive.org/web/20250127135637/http://horstvoelz...

The most remarkable detail might be the collaboration across the Iron Curtain with West German and Dutch computer enthusiasts.

6 days agoby flohofwoe

There 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

6 days agoby buildsjets

funny to think that there was a blip of people downloading software over the radio in the 80s, then the internet happened and it was all over hardwire, and now virtually all software is downloaded over the radio again

6 days agoby uneventual

Same in Sweden! One of the public radio channels (P2) had some nighttime shows with Commodore 64 programs. I can't remember if it was purely BASIC programs or just loaders using data statements for machine code. Seems really impractical now but back then everyone was using cassette tapes to record music from the radio and the C64 had a cassette deck to load software, so it worked quite well. Except that they, as far as I remember, did not use compression so most programs took ages to broadcast.

6 days agoby lemonad

Also in the 80s we (by which I mean other people), downloaded software from the television by sticking an LDR to the screen whilst a dot flashed black and white during the duration of a programme. A program from a programme.

I remember see the dot a few times, but it was probably very short lived.

6 days agoby CakeEngine

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.

6 days agoby theginger

I read this is how the CD Projekt Red founders smuggled Western games into the Iron Curtain states. I think it's an urban myth, but separately, the founders smuggled games into the USSR, and some games were smuggled through the radio then.

6 days agoby caseyy

In Brazil, during the 80s there was a service called "telegame". A user could use an Atari 2600 cartridge connected to a modem to download games from a catalogue of 150 diferente games.

6 days agoby thiagoharry

I remember here on HN reading about some vinyl which had either software or games on from the 80s but I dont recall the artist, so this doesnt sound too far from that for me.

6 days agoby giancarlostoro

Coincidently, downloading anything from wi-fi or cellular network is exactly the same thing. Just on steroids.

6 days agoby giusc

https://www.racunalniski-muzej.si/en/40-years-later-a-game-f...

6 days agoby cvladan

Fun fact: ham radio operators to this day use a similar technique to distribute images - it's called slow scan television.

6 days agoby mschuster91

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventilator_202

6 days agoby cvladan

I 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.

6 days agoby saltysalt

I really thought this was widely known...

https://hackaday.com/2024/05/09/the-zx-spectrum-takes-to-the...

6 days agoby cvladan

"Hällo? Can you play Frogger, for my Atari?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Oe4aB_lG4

6 days agoby Mashimo

BASICODE: the 8-bit programming API that crossed the Berlin Wall https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1vCpm1-9Yc

https://github.com/robhagemans

In German https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEsOwE_dpiU

6 days agoby sitkack

there was "live streaming" of concerts over special phone lines in the early/mid 1960's and sending photos over a dot matrix phone line system in the late 1940's first "drone" flight of an unmaned aircraft, steered by radio control was in the late 19teens old technical books and album covers, reveal the oddest stuff... so we are kind of living in an "alternate history" where everything that could of happened, actualy is happening, all at once, right now

6 days agoby metalman

I did that in Brasil in the late 80s! There was a show on the radio that every sunday afternoon they would broadcast computer programs! The problem is that I had a coco2 clone and most programs were for Spectrum or MSX (the more common machines in Brasil back then). Needless to say, any noise on the radio would damage the recording and the transmitter was very far from me so usually there was noise... :(

6 days agoby fabiopjve

This is wild. Was it a European thing only? I never heard of it in the states. I was stuck typing in games from the back pages of Compute's Gazette...

6 days agoby crazygringo

The robot also had a tape deck, and if you hit record on the tape you could later playback the pre-recorded actions for the robot.

6 days agoby ratg13

This would have been amazing if I had known about it. I had an Atari 600XL about 1984 I never even heard of a Commodore 64 back then. We wouldn't have been able to afford it anyway. I'm still shocked that my parents even bought me the Atari.

I did eventually get a cassette storage device. I wonder would it have worked for Atari too?

6 days agoby dghughes

I was born in 1980 in an Eastern European country. You could download games and software from TV, too. Provided you had the hardware to run them.

In 1986, a friend of my father, who was a computer science teacher, showed me a ZX Spectrum clone built using a Z80 CPU clone, he used at high school to teach kids.

But it wasn't until I was 10 or 11 years old, after the fall of the communist regime my parents afforded to buy me a ZX Spectrum clone, when kids in other countries already used IBM compatible PCs.

I still have fond memories of it, it was the computer where I first tried to program, typing BASIC commands from books.

6 days agoby DeathArrow

Some (I want to say mainly British) rock bands even included C64 games on their records.

The cassette interface to old 8-bitters is basically a modem, so you can transmit programs anywhere you can achieve a clear enough audio signal: cassettes, CDs, MP3 players, the radio...

6 days agoby bitwize

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.

6 days agoby atoav

I pirated music from the radio too!

6 days agoby ohgr

We 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.

6 days agoby weinzierl

The closest thing I remember (late 80s) was getting video games by copying the BASIC source code (typing it out by hand) from magazines from the library.

6 days agoby ks2048

Minimodem with and without Icecast can do today. But better if you share small games like the ZMachine ones.

6 days agoby anthk

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

6 days agoby pknerd

We then made turbo tapes out of them and crammed tens of games onto single C-cassettes.

6 days agoby kookamamie

we never downloaded anything from the radio but we did absolutely use audio cassette dubbing to copy code

6 days agoby reverendsteveii