N
Story
In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio
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.
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 :)
  • kotor
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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).
I never had a tape deck, and was constantly flustered by “press play on tape” messages.
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.
  • unsui
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My favorite was the "TYPO II" ("Type Your Program Once") application, which was part of every Antic! Magazine program listing:

https://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n9/TYPOII.html https://www.atarimagazines.com/antic/

This was wrapper around the BASIC interpreter that printed out a 2-character checksum of each entered code line.

The magazine printing also had an associated 2-character checksum for each line. Your job: make sure the checksums matched.

As a teenager who only had cassette-based storage (couldn't afford a disk drive) and was addicted to typing in programs from Antic! and ANALOG magazines, this was a lifesaver.

(ANALOG's checksum program wasn't quite as convenient, and, IIRC, required a disk drive?)

I took a look at the listing[1] and looks like it contains unprintable characters, maybe they were ASCII art of some sort?

The checksum algorithm is fairly simple: line 32150 sums the products of all character positions and character codes, and lines 32160-32180 does a modulus to convert them to printable characters. The multiply-by-position bit is clever because it allows the checksum to flag transposed characters. ISBN-10 uses a similar scheme[2].

[1] https://www.atarimagazines.com/software/displayfile.php?file...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN#ISBN-10_check_digits

  • unsui
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I naturally went down a rabbit hole to see if I could find why those characters weren't printing properly.

https://www.atarimania.com/mags/pdf/Antic_Vol_7_No_4.pdf

On p. 31, you can see the intended characters.

I now remember that Atari actually had their own variant of ASCII, called ATASCII:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATASCII

Atari 8-bits were actually really cool computers, in that they let you do things like redefine character sets entirely (to create custom character sets to effectively create tile-based displays), play with display-list interrupts, etc.

Nice find :)

I guess Atari character set has enough overlap with ASCII, so I could get the checksum to match:

    sum = 0
    "32000 REM TYPO II BY ANDY BARTON".codepoints.each_with_index{|c, i| sum += (i + 1) * c }
    print ((sum % 676) / 26 + 65).chr, (sum % 26 + 65).chr, "\n"
(Ruby code, outputs "WB")
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?

  • onre
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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.

A checksum for each line of code. COMPUTE! magazine used one, the article introducing it and explaining how to use it is at https://archive.org/details/1983-10-computegazette/page/n49/....

The code listings had a comment (rem) at the end of each line with a checksum number, when you used the checksum program it would display a checksum at the top of the screen that would match if you entered the line correctly.

An example page of code with checksums is at https://archive.org/details/1983-10-computegazette/page/146/....

A life changing event for those of us entering code from magazine listings in the early '80s.

That's awesome. Thanks!
Semi related, I created linesum a few years back https://github.com/moreati/linesum to line by line sha256.
  • ako
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For the zx81 i think it was usually some encoded binary form, so no compiler/interpreter involved.
Also typeset in a non-fixed width font with long lines truncated to fit the copy layout!
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.

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.

At least the 5 1/4 disks did. 3 1/2 disks did not like it at all. As long as you didn't crease anything the 5 1/4s would usually still work. The data wasn't especially dense on those (if you could see magnetic fields the patches would have been large enough to be visible to the naked eye) so the could take some abuse. At least until the magnetic coating started flaking off.
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.
For Speccies the added debuff was typing over the poorly scanned rolls of lowrez thermal printed code. The Spectrum's ecosystem's thermal printer's output was barely legible straight of the press, let alone as a second generation copy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnY_ra-cHM0

I did the same with an Atari 400 that had a cassette tape. I remember it would take 30 minutes or so to load/save games I copied from magazines. The keyboard was torture. I then moved on to very rudimentary text adventures of my own once I felt a bit comfortable with BASIC. I'm very glad my father bought that for me...he was a painter and we didn't have a lot of money then. It was extremely formative.
I remember my Dad read an article in some computer magazine back in the day about hacks you could do to the Balderdash video game for Atari. I'm not sure what he had to do, maybe use a hex editor on the binary. He was able to do things like make Rockford eat objects besides dirt and diamonds, or be invulnerable, or there could be multiple Rockfords on the screen at one.
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.
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.
"App"!?

https://archive.org/details/TRS-80_Microcomputer_News_Volume...

A buddy of mine and I realized that if one of us read the code while the other typed, it was much less prone to errors. Once we got it all typed in, we'd switch places when debugging the inevitable typos made. The DATA lines full of nonsensical text (what we now know was hex encoded data) were the go to place for checking for typos.
  • nunez
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Wow; old-school driver-navigator pairing. Really cool!
My older brother would type in games on the Atari 400 from magazines like Compute! The 400 had a brutal membrane keyboard, and we had no storage so you could then enjoy it until the device powered down and then that work was lost.

The computer was half a decade old at this point but we were poor so it was pretty great to us.

After he finished hours of typing in a game, he called my friend and I to see the magic of first run. My friend, having never seen the 400 before, pops open the cartridge cover to see what's in there, which is an action that powers off the computer.

Painful! I remember being able to at least store the finished program on a floppy. Luxury!
I typed out a blood alcohol calculator in BASIC on my Apple clone around 85 or 86, body weight, amount of drinks and it charted out BAC over time. It was interesting to see the variations between a number a drinks and timing. Don't recall if it was BYTE or some other source.
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Oh god yes

And that in the era when you could see not much of your code all at once, and trying to catch the issue with LIST was a pain too

There was something magical starting to type a listing that started with `10 GOSUB 10000`.
I had the Dragon 32, which is the only Welsh microcomputer ever made (I think). Fantastic machine.
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.

GW Basic came with DOS, but there was a way to get real BASICA onto a clone, either through ROMS or with a patch.
The hardest programs to type were in 6502 assembly. One byte mistake and the entire program was botched.
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 was 'big in East Germany' though (see my comment about Prof Dr Horst Voelz). A translated section from that link:

"The response to the show was unexpectedly overwhelming. Over the course of the approximately 60 episodes, the station received a total of approximately 50,000 letters from listeners. This was unprecedented in the history of broadcasting."

...and of course as a teenager I was eagerly awaiting each show and recorded the programs that were broadcasted at the end :)

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.

  • p3rls
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Eh, I was a little too young to be there at the time but your experience sounds infinitely cooler than a NFT tattoo which just might be the lamest thing I've heard in my life and I feel worse about the world for learning about.
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
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
There's only a 3 second sample out of the 2 minutes of radio programming.
You with your fancy GOSUB-supporting computer...
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.

BBSes postdated internets (at the time often "catenets"), though only by a few years. They were just open to more people for a long time.
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 first BBS, CBBS/Chicago, online in February 01978.

As for internets, Louis Pouzin proposed internetworking in 01974, and Cerf and Kahn published "A Proposal for Packet Network Intercommunication" https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1092259 the same year. Within the ARPANET project, the Internet Experiment Note series began in 01977. IEN 1 https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien1.pdf is dated "29 July 1977". But, although it's talking about "the last couple of years" and "the ARPANET internetworking community", it seems to be talking about proposals for networking protocols to implement, not reporting results from actual experiments. IEN 65 https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien65.pdf are the meeting notes from the TCP meeting of August 5, 01977, including an assignment of what would later be called "class A" IP network numbers; for example, network 18[.0.0.0] is assigned to LCS at MIT, an assignment MIT still retains today, and network 10[.0.0.0] is assigned to ARPANET, an assignment it would retain until it was shut down. But that doesn't mean they could actually send packets with those addresses yet. At that point they were still considering things like variable-length addresses (in IEN 66).

Even in IEN 22 in February 01978 https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien22.pdf they are talking about all plans to set up routers in the future tense, while IEN 46 from June 01978 https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien46.txt talks about MIT already having two local networks (apparently participating in the internet experiment) and concerns about "upheaval to (...) gateway [router] code".

IEN 51 from July 01978 reports high levels of packet loss in the SATNET gateways https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien51.txt, suggesting that UCL was somewhat successfully internetworking at that point.

But IEN 53 from August 01978 opens saying, "Vint put the stress on the need for the Internet to be a working system very soon," proposing various milestone dates for 01979, though it also reports that "3 gateways are up between SATNET & ARPANET", and that an internet was up and working at PARC interconnecting 22 to 25 ethernets over PRNET, but presumably not using IP (at the time called IN).

IEN 60 from October 01978 https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien60.pdf section V reports, "Testing of this [new shortest path] routing algorithm [is] in progress[,] and it should be operational in the ARPANET/PRNET gateways and the ARPANET/SATNET gateways by the end of this year."

Later that month, IEN 63 https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien63.pdf reports, "A number of [Internet] feasibility demos have been done. We need to show an operational [Internet] capability. In June 1979, eighty users will be online via PRNET in Ft. Bragg. In April 1979, there will be a PRNET demo at Ft. Sill. In May-June 1979, UCL will be disconnected from the rest of the ARPANET and will depend on the Internet system." It also reports that at BBN the SATNET-ARPANET router and the PRNET-ARPANET router are now operating, and asks, "Is IN [IP] available directly without TCP?" Forgie at Lincoln Lab reports, "Hope to have an internet speech capability up by the end of the year." This is also when today's minimum MTU of 576 octets was established.

In IEN 76 https://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien76.pdf in January 01979, "Ginny [Strazisar at BBN] noted that both the SATNET and PRNET gateways will run both IN-4 [IPv4] and old protocols by the end of January." So at this point they did in fact have the internet up and working. BBN reported success running TCP/IP ("TCP-4") on PDP-11 Unix, Noel Chiappa at MIT LCS had four running internet nodes on Multics, and at NDRE in Norway "TCP-4 has been running for about three months".

So I think that, by any reasonable definition, the internet that we're using today was up and running in late 01978, on multiple operating systems and multiple continents. It just wasn't very big yet. The packets they were sending would probably have been interpretable by today's Wireshark, though I'm not sure about that (IEN 54 defined the IP header format that was standardized in RFC 760, but there might be subtle incompatibilities, and I'm less sure about TCP), and even some of today's IP-address space allocations were already established. If you were to bring up a software emulation of the Multics TCP/IP stack on your LAN, you could probably telnet to it.

The other internets like the one at Xerox PARC might have predated the TCP/IP internet we use today, but not by more than a few months—not by enough to predate the BBS. IBM's internal corporate worldwide computer network was a few years earlier; I forget what it was called, but I don't think it was an internet.

My error was that I had thought that there were lots of internetworking experiments in the years leading up to IPv4, given that the concept was published four years earlier. I didn't appreciate the slowness of the development of the necessary software and the resulting degree of preplanning and deliberation. BBN's Unix TCP/IP was written in PDP-11 assembly, and presumably the TCP/IP stacks for Multics and the PDP-10 were also written in assembly, which may be one reason for the slowness.

As for "what most people today think of as the internet", ignorant people have all kinds of stupid misconceptions. They think that cellphones send radio signals to satellites, that Christopher Columbus discovered the United States, that Henry Ford invented the automobile, that many people eat too much salt, that microwave ovens are radioactive, that vaccines cause autism, and that Xbox Live and WhatsApp don't use the internet. But presumably nobody that ignorant is participating in this discussion, so I don't know why you'd bring it up.

> 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...
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.

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.
  • nunez
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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???
I was skeptical until I saw information confirming it.

It's not obvious that the frequency range used by computers recording on audiocassette would fit into that used by AM or FM radio transmission and reception equipment.

In other words, it's obvious that it would be possible on equipment specifically designed for it.

But I'm quite surprised that it worked without it (presumably) having been designed for. Or maybe they did pick a frequency ceiling compatible with commercial radio intentionally?

The cassette loading/saving on home computers had to be extremely failure tolerant so that it would work with low quality tapes and shitty recorders. I guess as a side effect this failure tolerance also made it work over radio.
I was alive, and it did happen.

I never did it myself, but did get copies of the (British I think) broadcasts on cassette for the ZX Spectrum. iirc a program would be about five-six minutes of beeps.

For real. It's really not that much of a stretch.
I did this in New Zealand around 1985-6 on Saturday mornings around 930 IIRC. It was recorded onto cassette tape and then loaded into our BBC Micro B. We couldn't afford a disk drive. I can also remember typing in many BASIC programs from magazine listings. That was how we learned.
> What do people think

Well...

> do people think

Often, no.

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...

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.
That's why you needed it saved with Turbo. it was at least 10 times faster.. I used to have this cartridge... besides turbo it had some more things, it could grab a hardcopy of memory (ie if you were playing a game.. you could save it... and then load it later, it would be in the same state)

https://www.ami64.com/product-page/kcs-power-cartridge-c64

See also https://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/2016/11/what-was-first-co...

300 Bps is demon speed! I remember using an acoustic coupler to access the early internet at 300 BAUD (i.e. 300 bps), or about 30 char/sec.

Later on, I also remember downloading Linux kernel tarballs, hot off the press, via FTP using 9600 bps modem (if I recall correctly - slow as crap), which I'd kick off before going to bed and hope for the best in the morning. Sometimes I'd make a script to download a few different files at once.

On the theme of slow computing in general, I remember doing embedded software builds on a PDP 11 (Xenix) that would take an hour or so to complete - so you'd go and practice your juggling or somesuch waiting for it to complete.

Still, the big thrill in mid-late 70's had been the switch from batch punched card deck submissions to a mainframe (an hour later comeback to collect the syntax error, or core dump printout) to being ONLINE (woo hoo!) - sitting in front of a terminal and actually interacting with a computer in real time!

The beeb could do 1200 baud. I'm pretty sure you could load any game in 5 minutes. A 7 minute tape could hold 64KB.

Wikipedia says the Spectrum could do even better.

That's what you get for using an inferior machine. Spectrum users had no such problem.
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.

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

Ah, the retro equivalent of "curl -L <script-url> | bash" ... :)
Yep. But of course security was not a concern with the machines of the era. At all. There wasn't even the concept beyond locking the entire computer away in a cabinet. For the most part a virus couldn't hurt your machine or survive a power off, although there are a few machines of the era with buggy "killer registers" that you could set that would cause a malfunction serious enough that could burn out some part of the machine.
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
  • Svip
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Even if most devices receive data wirelessly these days, the transfer to its last wireless transmitter will be almost entirely wired. Mobile masts are wired, wireless routers are wired, and so on. That being said, consumer devices are but a part of the much larger group of digital devices connected to the internet in some fashion, and a lot of them remains wired to the internet. "Virtually all software" being downloaded wirelessly feels like a big claim.

And this is not entirely an exercise in pedantry and semantics, since traditional radios were not wired, they weren't the "last transmitter" in a long chain, but were rather often _the_ transmitter. The data for download had to be physically moved _to_ the radio station. (I believe wireless extenders for radio exists, and maybe even some wired for larger coverage, but my understanding is radio still remains exceedingly local, and national stations are largely transmitted via the internet first.)

Though a quick aside; it's funny that you refer to wireless as radio, when in radio's infancy, it was most commonly referred to as "wireless" (e.g. "on the wireless").

In the UK transfer to the last wireless transmitter in radio are almost always wired (ISDN or similar back in the 80s). Wireless repeaters were used in the early days of TV, but rare for radio
Microwave links used to be used to transmit TV, calls and data before fibre became commonplace. Presumably also radio for nationwide stations at least.
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.
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.

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.
Datablast, and Tom Scott has a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBs_ABt-hRc

It's one of those ideas that makes a whole lot more sense at the broadcast studio where everyone edits on consoles[0] tied to Betacam decks that have exact, to-the-field seek timecodes and stable freeze frame capability. Even a 4-head VCR would utterly ruin it though.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEMdmnNbCZA

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.
  • pfoof
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According to the story, he wrote a letter to some western guy and he sent him back a cassette with a game or two, and then the copying spree started.
I remember hearing about people who were really into data broadcast over shortwave radio. They were mostly prepper types, but I'm sure there were some pirates among them.

Here's a pretty thorough article on data over radio:

https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/may2015_Steber

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.
I bet that worked pretty well considering an Atari 2600 cart is 4kb. Even over a 300 baud modem with all of the encoding overhead that's about 20 seconds to download the whole thing.
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Coincidently, downloading anything from wi-fi or cellular network is exactly the same thing. Just on steroids.
  • nunez
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Remember when you could "hear" cellular transmission when you moved a cell phone too close to a speaker? That was cool/annoying.
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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.

This still works if you get your phone too close to an electric guitar!
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.
In the GDR there was this BASICODE record (German website, no https, a personal blog site): http://www.simulationsraum.de/blog/2016/01/08/hard-bit-rock/

(German) Wikipedia article: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE

I recorded to tape cassette GDR radio shows on VHF that broadcast code, usually for the GDR "KC 85" 8 bit computer line (U880 processor - Z80 clone).

Funny thing is, you could easily tell from the sounds if the code was assembler or BASIC. The latter was much more orderly and structured.

Problems occurred when someone nearby turned on an electrical device during that transmission, because it was audible and introduced too much of an error and the recording became unusable.

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Occasionally magazines in the UK would come with cover flexidiscs. They were similar to 7" records, but very much one (maybe two or three) "plays" only, so your first job was to copy the flexidisc to cassette tape.

Your Computer certainly had a few of these in the early 1980s.

One example is documented here: https://magazinesfromthepast.fandom.com/wiki/Your_Computer_V... By the way, you have no idea how exciting and space-age that cover looked in 1982.

1987 LP "Poniżej krytyki" of a Polish synth-pop group Papa Dance had a ZX Spectrum quiz game about the band on it. I actually have a copy of it. Pretty sure that wasn't the first such record in general, but it likely was the first one in Poland.

https://www.discogs.com/release/631562-Papa-Dance-Poni%C5%BC...

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Much later in the year 2000 there was the 8-Bit Construction Set record: http://www.beigerecords.com/products/beg-004.html

It had Atari and Commodore music (as audio) as well as Atari and Commodore software (as data).

Despite the claim on their old page to be the “first use of vinyl for software distribution” they did later acknowledge and reference some prior art in a Slashdot thread: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=140154&threshold=-1&com...

This might be it, but I'm not 100% sure, my memory is not what it used to be, there are also a few other good answers.

I wish HN would let you search upvoted comments and submissions, it would revolutionize my life since I can remember previous things I've upvoted, but have no easy way to find any of them. I might sit down one day, and manually export all my liked comments and subscriptions.

You're thinking of The Thompson Twins https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thompson_Twins_Adventure
Or could be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camouflage_(Chris_Sievey_song). Or probably other things too.

Edit: There is a (small) wikipedia category for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Vinyl_data

Idk thank you. My money is still on it being the Thompson Twins though - they were top 10 regulars and household names at the time. :)
My money says Frank Sidebottom (Chris Sievey's alter ego) probably has more cultural currency than The Thompson Twins in 202x. But obviously idk what they're thinking of.
I would love that to be true!
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Some computer magazines included a 7 inch "flexi" record with software on. i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc#/media/File:FloppyR...
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventilator_202
awesome stuff, YT has it and modli.rs is, well, up and running.

thank you!

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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.
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!
Oh nice, I never knew about that!
Then came a nifty upgrade called "LED control" which installed a red LED next to that screw so all you had to do was turn until it was brightest, significantly reducing ?LOAD ERROR. Good times.
Yep, there was also a program where a red line would be on your monitor and you had to turn the screw until the line was completely flat
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... :(
I really thought this was widely known...

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

https://xkcd.com/1053/
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

"Hällo? Can you play Frogger, for my Atari?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Oe4aB_lG4
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...
I remember a Spanish radio program doing this (“Bienvenido Mr. chip”)
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?

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.

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.
Fun fact: ham radio operators to this day use a similar technique to distribute images - it's called slow scan television.
Also check out rtty and FT8/FT4 for those interested in other "digital over analog" modes.
Bell 202 lives on as well: https://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from-helicop...

In this case, continuous GPS coordinates are sent on one audio channel while the other channel is voice.

My brain is unable to grasp it..How does it work and at what speed things used to get downloaded?
This is the “loading” of the classic ZX Spectrum computer game Manic Miner coded by programming genius Mathew Smith. The data is converted into audio and sold on cassette tapes. Instead of a disk drive, you would plug in an audio cassette tape player into the ZX Spectrum computer and “play” the sound into the computer, which would then read this audio as data and use it to load the game into memory, after which it could then be played. So instead of distributing the audio as cassette, in this case that same audio is broadcast over the radio and people would record it from the radio onto a cassette tape. Then playing the cassette into the computer would load (“download”) the game into the machine. Primitive but it works, and what we had to put up with.

Imagine being six years old and wanting to play Manic Miner, and having to sit there for 6 minutes while your TV did this before you could play the game:

https://youtu.be/kHn_BvTBALI?si=5CrKYa6DlNZTN7In

(Please watch in full without doing anything else or scrolling for the authentic experience)

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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.

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
This series of videos walks through building a circuit to decode one type of audio data format that was used in the 80s and send data to a computer and discusses how the audio signal works and simple circuit to turn it into digital data https://www.gregorystrike.com/2023/01/07/kansas-city-standar...

(I just got another one of these kits because I had previously built, successfully tested, then threw it out after I had some issues using it as-is, but I want to build it again with the additional electronics experience I have now.)

Regular audio cassettes were also used as storage medium for software. Distributing over radio just mean playing these tapes. And people could then record the broadcast at home and load the software from cassette.
We then made turbo tapes out of them and crammed tens of games onto single C-cassettes.
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I pirated music from the radio too!
Nitpick: It's not 'pirating' when it's for your own use, only when you 'distribute' it to others. Of course nobody cared either way ;)
Distributing later would be Robin-Hooding. Pirating is for personal gain
Home taping is killing music. You see what you've done? Modern music doesn't even have lyrics. Is ded.
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we never downloaded anything from the radio but we did absolutely use audio cassette dubbing to copy code
Tangentially related, Radio Shack had a remote control robot called Robie Sr. You could move him around, turn his eyes on as lights, and make him say whatever you wanted through the remote.

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.

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...

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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.

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

Also in the UK.

Ceefax provided various programs for the BBC Micro. Or more generally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesoftware