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.
There was something magical starting to type a listing that started with `10 GOSUB 10000`.
https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/obituary-rot.html
> An unfortunate side effect of this move to digital-only obits will likely only become apparent a few decades from now, and it will likely frustrate the next few generations of genealogists hunting for records of early 21st century ancestors.
> Print newspapers were well suited for both the distribution and preservation of obituaries. Distribution isn’t a problem for digital obituaries, and in many ways the web is better than print in this respect. But when it comes to preservation, there are many factors that make digital obits in their current state particularly susceptible to rot.