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 :)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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".
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 :)
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
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.
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.
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):
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.
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 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.
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 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.
"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.
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)
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!
Readit News
You’d just get a big error message for the whole program.
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.
Oh yes they do.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnY_ra-cHM0
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
https://archive.org/details/TRS-80_Microcomputer_News_Volume...
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.
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.
"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 :)
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbD49LoIZ_0&list=PLk5kr7-twZ...
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.
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?
Well...
> do people think
Often, no.
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...
https://www.ami64.com/product-page/kcs-power-cartridge-c64
See also https://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/2016/11/what-was-first-co...
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!
Wikipedia says the Spectrum could do even better.