In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You with your fancy GOSUB-supporting computer...

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Ah, the retro equivalent of "curl -L <script-url> | bash" ... :)

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").