[HN Gopher] In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio
___________________________________________________________________
In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio
Author : spzb
Score : 249 points
Date : 2025-03-28 22:14 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (newslttrs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newslttrs.com)
| uneventual wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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").
| ta1243 wrote:
| 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
| Sharlin wrote:
| Microwave links used to be used to transmit TV, calls and
| data before fibre became commonplace. Presumably also radio
| for nationwide stations at least.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| You're thinking of The Thompson Twins
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thompson_Twins_Adventure
| Joeboy wrote:
| 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
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| 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. :)
| Joeboy wrote:
| 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.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| I would love that to be true!
| nosianu wrote:
| 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.
| jalk wrote:
| Some computer magazines included a 7 inch "flexi" record with
| software on. i.e.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc#/media/File:FloppyR...
| rwmj wrote:
| 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.
| vatys wrote:
| 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...
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| 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.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| 1987 LP "Ponizej 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...
| coreyh14444 wrote:
| 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.
| mysterydip wrote:
| 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 :)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Also typeset in a non-fixed width font with long lines
| truncated to fit the copy layout!
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| 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.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| 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.
| tantalor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| 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-computegazet
| te/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://arch
| ive.org/details/1983-10-computegazette/page/146/....
|
| A life changing event for those of us entering code from
| magazine listings in the early '80s.
| moreati wrote:
| Semi related, I created linesum a few years back
| https://github.com/moreati/linesum to line by line
| sha256.
| unsui wrote:
| 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?)
| ako wrote:
| For the zx81 i think it was usually some encoded binary
| form, so no compiler/interpreter involved.
| kotor wrote:
| 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).
| ratg13 wrote:
| I never had a tape deck, and was constantly flustered by
| "press play on tape" messages.
| section_me wrote:
| 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.
| ztetranz wrote:
| Floppy disks DO NOT BEND!
|
| Oh yes they do.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| krige wrote:
| 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
| llm_nerd wrote:
| 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.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Painful! I remember being able to at least store the finished
| program on a floppy. Luxury!
| colkassad wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Wow; old-school driver-navigator pairing. Really cool!
| cstuder wrote:
| 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.
| weinzierl wrote:
| 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.
| kolanos wrote:
| 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.
| waltbosz wrote:
| 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.
| nsenifty wrote:
| There was something magical starting to type a listing that
| started with `10 GOSUB 10000`.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| 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.
| nocman wrote:
| 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.
| ben7799 wrote:
| 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.
| ryoshu wrote:
| 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.
| nurettin wrote:
| The hardest programs to type were in 6502 assembly. One byte
| mistake and the entire program was botched.
| metalman wrote:
| 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
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Here's a personal record of Prof Dr Horst Volz (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.
| Joeboy wrote:
| 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.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| 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 :)
| p3rls wrote:
| 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.
| koonsolo wrote:
| 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.
| caseyy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| snozolli wrote:
| 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
| ochrist wrote:
| 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
| robertpnl wrote:
| 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
| dylan604 wrote:
| There's only a 3 second sample out of the 2 minutes of radio
| programming.
| smitelli wrote:
| 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
| smilespray wrote:
| You with your fancy GOSUB-supporting computer...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Fun fact: ham radio operators to this day use a similar technique
| to distribute images - it's called slow scan television.
| simondanerd wrote:
| Also check out rtty and FT8/FT4 for those interested in other
| "digital over analog" modes.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| 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.
| saltysalt wrote:
| 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.
| HNDen21 wrote:
| 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...
| saltysalt wrote:
| Oh nice, I never knew about that!
| makeset wrote:
| 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.
| HNDen21 wrote:
| 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
| j_french wrote:
| 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!
| DeathArrow wrote:
| 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.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Also in the UK.
|
| Ceefax provided various programs for the BBC Micro. Or more
| generally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesoftware
| bpoyner wrote:
| 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.
| forinti wrote:
| 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.
| HNDen21 wrote:
| 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...
| Marazan wrote:
| That's what you get for using an inferior machine. Spectrum
| users had no such problem.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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!
| cvladan wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventilator_202
| tenderfault wrote:
| awesome stuff, YT has it and modli.rs is, well, up and running.
|
| thank you!
| cvladan wrote:
| I really thought this was widely known...
|
| https://hackaday.com/2024/05/09/the-zx-spectrum-takes-to-the...
| fragmede wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| cvladan wrote:
| https://www.racunalniski-muzej.si/en/40-years-later-a-game-f...
| ohgr wrote:
| I pirated music from the radio too!
| flohofwoe wrote:
| 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 ;)
| bmacho wrote:
| Distributing later would be Robin-Hooding. Pirating is for
| personal gain
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Home taping is killing music. You see what you've done? Modern
| music doesn't even have lyrics. Is ded.
| thiagoharry wrote:
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| Minimodem with and without Icecast can do today. But better if
| you share small games like the ZMachine ones.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| 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.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| 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.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > 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 ...
| kragen wrote:
| 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.
| drivers99 wrote:
| On 5-digit years and Y10K compliance
| https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-
| dates-an...
| dghughes wrote:
| 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?
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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_...
| pantulis wrote:
| I remember a Spanish radio program doing this ("Bienvenido Mr.
| chip")
| atoav wrote:
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| lemonad wrote:
| 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.
| CakeEngine wrote:
| 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.
| theginger wrote:
| 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.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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
| pknerd wrote:
| My brain is unable to grasp it..How does it work and at what
| speed things used to get downloaded?
| jpalomaki wrote:
| 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.
| gizajob wrote:
| 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)
| nunez wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| 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
| drivers99 wrote:
| 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.)
| ks2048 wrote:
| 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.
| kookamamie wrote:
| We then made turbo tapes out of them and crammed tens of games
| onto single C-cassettes.
| giusc wrote:
| Coincidently, downloading anything from wi-fi or cellular network
| is exactly the same thing. Just on steroids.
| nunez wrote:
| Remember when you could "hear" cellular transmission when you
| moved a cell phone too close to a speaker? That was
| cool/annoying.
| eszed wrote:
| 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.
| ben7799 wrote:
| This still works if you get your phone too close to an
| electric guitar!
| nunez wrote:
| 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???
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _What do people think_
|
| Well...
|
| > _do people think_
|
| Often, no.
| forestgreen76 wrote:
| For real. It's really not that much of a stretch.
| cobbaut wrote:
| 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.
| quenched wrote:
| 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.
| buildsjets wrote:
| 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
| nacnud wrote:
| Ah, the retro equivalent of "curl -L <script-url> | bash" ...
| :)
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| weinzierl wrote:
| 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.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| we never downloaded anything from the radio but we did absolutely
| use audio cassette dubbing to copy code
| Mashimo wrote:
| "Hallo? Can you play Frogger, for my Atari?"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Oe4aB_lG4
| danieldk wrote:
| 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...
| ben7799 wrote:
| 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.
| bluedino wrote:
| 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...
| bitwize wrote:
| 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...
| sitkack wrote:
| 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
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