So cool, thanks for sharing.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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I didn't know about these radio broadcasts, but I did use to buy (pirated) games on cassette tape to load on my (unlicensed) ZX spectrum clone using my mini-boombox. Good times. :)
TIL!
Yes, I'm in this picture, although it makes perfect sense in hindsight. It's what I would have done if I wanted to get computing going in the 20th century.
It never really worked for me. I don’t recall ever being able to successfully use a cassette tape as a software storage medium.
I never had this option. Typing in the whole thing manually from 4 pages of tiny print in BYTE magazine was my go to. Always had to be quick to save progress on cassette whenever mom came near with the vacuum cleaner
A VIC-20 was my first computer and I had never heard of this! Had to do the same with a magazine.
To be fair, I remember writing a choose your own adventure text based game in basic, and the only way to save and reload what you had programmed was via audio cassette.
Someone once argues with me on here that downloading updates and games in the late 90s wasn't real. This is very gratifying lol.
Downloading updates for what?
Diablo is what I remember.
Really? I don't really remember any game that received updates back when, but I didn't play diablo.
I wonder if the same people also think manipulating the tones to make free phone calls, as shown in Hackers, is also just a Hollywood myth. That shit was actually real.
Jokes on you nobody under the age of 50 has seen Hackers
I'm barely under 50 and never heard of this. And I watched mcgiver as a kid.
Phreaky
We do now too… it’s called WiFi 😅
I mean technically speaking if you're connected on wifi you still are....
Came to say exactly this. 🤦🏼♂️ Kids these days.
Except for the non-broadcast transmission, storage methods, modulation, data rates, error correction, frequencies used, protocols, antennas, infrastructure, etc.....
Like it's not the same except for being "over the air".
Boomers these days 🤦🏻♀️
- Gen Z
Edit: Looks like he didn't like the taste of his own ageism.
Didn’t some magazines ship software with plastic records that could be played on a conventional record player?
I only used cassette tape drives a couple times in 3rd grade before we upgraded to Apple IIs, but even then I knew to try putting a music tape in it.
It didn’t work.
I did the same thing with PlayStation games in CD players. And my PC. Sometimes they actually had music that played in a CD player, and sometimes cutscenes were just AVI files you could watch on a PC without playing the game!
It was rather common for PC games to include regular everyday "red book" audio for background music; I seem to remember back in the day you'd actually have to hook the optical drive to the sound card with a cable so it could pass through audio.
The Secret of Monkey Island did this for its CD releases; the audio options for that game ranged from PC speaker to Ad-Lib chip tunes to Roland MT-32 support and eventually CD Audio. The game shipped on a few diskettes, a few megabytes tops, so the whole game is tiny on a single 750MB CD, plenty of room for extremely high quality game audio.
I did that a bit, for C64 games. I recall it being a mix of fun, tedious and extremely frustrating if there was even the slightest transmission interference while recording, then all you could do was wait for the next transmission and hope they went better.
And Programs/Games came on Casettes :)
You had cassettes? We had to manually transcribe machine code from printed listings.
Just in case, no it's not a joke.
Examle: Book - 101 BASIC games: https://archive.org/details/101basiccomputer0000davi
well yeah and because you don't want to type the listing down all over again, you save it onto tape.