An anonymous user sent this one in, and even though it’s old – 2014 – I hadn’t read it yet, and I don’t think it’s ever been posted here.
It’s a Monday night in Bristol in July 1983. Your parents are downstairs watching Coronation Street while you skulk in your bedroom under the pretence of doing homework. In reality, you’re hunched over your cassette recorder, fingers hovering over the buttons in feverish anticipation. A quiver of excitement runs through you as a voice from the radio announces: “and now the moment you’ve all been waiting for…” There’s a satisfying clunk as you press down on play and record simultaneously, and moments later the room is filled with strange metallic squawks and crackles. “SCREEEEEEEEEEE…”
You’re listening to the Datarama show on Radio West and partaking in the UK’s first attempt to send a computer program over local radio. Joe Tozer, who co-hosted the show, recalls how it all began: “I think it was just one of those ‘ping!’ moments when you realise that the home computer program is just audio on a cassette, so why not transmit it over air? It just seemed a cool idea.”
I have very little experience with using cassettes as a data storage medium, except for that one time, somewhere in the late ’80s or early ’90s, where a neighbour kid and I loaded Rambo for the C64 from a cassette tape. That’s the only time I ever did such a thing, and in hindsight, I’m glad I got to experience this era of computing, even if it was only once.
Yes, the BBC programme Tomorrow’s World did this live for the BBC Micro B computer.
It worked too….
Wasn’t Tomorrow’s World on TV, rather than radio?
Nice article. This stuff was a bit before my time, but when I got my first BBC Micro I remember it coming with a tape of programmes that had been recorded off the radio this way, from the BBC’s ‘Chip Shop’ radio programme, when they used late-night radio down-time to run a ‘software takeaway service’.
Nicely remembered! Yeah. “Chip Shop”. I had a tape of their programs.
I also had ZX81 software on FlexiDisk and Spectrum apps where it came on 2 tapes. You loaded the game then played the audio cassette when the game told you. MULTIMEDIA FTW!
I seem to remember a few band releasing software on 45’s to.
Mad crazy times.
I’m pretty sure I got 2 ZX81’s to communicate via the ear & mic sockets and a crossover cable.
Those were the days of sweet, sweet, 1Kb memory.
Data vinyl!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FloppyRom_Magazine.jpg
http://www.kempa.com/vinyl-data/
I think Rockbox ( http://www.rockbox.org ) should do something like this – several of its targets have built-in microphone apart from (obviously) audio out, so with 2 rockboxed players it would be possible to have data network for exchanging files (well, small ones / as proof of concept) or multiplayer gaming!
(other than Pong, which is playable by two people on one player)
That’s the only time I ever did such a thing, and in hindsight, I’m glad I got to experience this era of computing, even if it was only once.
Yes, because you only did it once it has retro charm!
If you had to wait 14(!!!!) minutes for ZX81 Flight Simulator to load (with no error checking) only to watch it fall over at run time…
…you realise it was crap and not something anyone should ever have to do again!
It was the same with the radio broadcasts. I do remember trying to use them but I also remember them as error prone.
Basically it was just very cheap compare to anything else.
Right. As you say in your other post “mad crazy times”… but not ones anyone should want to repeat! Praying to the cassette player for it to load correctly was my first experience of religious faith. The only thing more error prone was typing out code from a magazine: the code never ran correctly, then you had to wait a month before you knew whether it was your mistake, or a printing error!
I’m amazed to discover the Internet Archive has Acorn User back issues online, for anyone masochistic enough to want to recreate the experience: https://archive.org/stream/Acorn_User_Issue_No._081_1989-04_Redwood_…
With Black Box fast loader routines cartridge for C64 and tapes recorded in its format, Datasette was a reasonably fast and reliable storage medium …the only one I (and many more) could afford as a 9 year old, when I bought Commodore 64 with my own money.
Though it typically required precise alignment of the reading head with a screwdriver… (luckily, on the cartridge there was a module for it, showing how “focused” the track is)
Worthy of mention as computer data medium are also VHS tapes – there were Amiga and PC expansions which allowed using a VHS video recorder and tapes as a large size, for its time, archive medium.
This was especially fun when you got tapes from someone else who had their Datasette aligned differently….
Well yeah, practically every tape required it to be slightly different; perhaps a leftower from how pirate tapes were replicated (with completelly analogue decks I guess). Though the few original games I got late in life of C64, when they were finally available at my place, also required it (even though they weren’t in the format of fast loader cartridge…)
Valhalla on the ZX Spectrum also took an insane long time to load (30 minutes? Maybe, that’s what it felt like).
It was a good game though so it was worth the wait.
I still load from cassette tape very occasionally on my Atari 600 & 800XL. It’s quite satisfying to listen to the screeching and hear the pangs of nostalgia filling the room!
I remember that this was quite a thing in easter Germany, where we had a serious lack of floppy disks.
Once a whole OS was transmitted via Radio, probably for the KC85/4. The OS was called CAOS ;-
I remember watching a 30-minute TV show about “home computers” in 1987, in Yugoslavia. At some point, a host announced they’re going to broadcast some Spectrum game. So the “impossible noise” (as I called it) came and went for several minutes, during which few silent people in the studio could be seen patiently waiting for it complete. I wondered:
1) does anyone in the home audience even cares about this?
2) how insane this was 🙂
There was also a radio programme with computer software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventilator_202
Generally, you had some cool stuff in Yugoslavia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaksija_(computer)
I remember playing Elite on a Sinclair Spectrum clone… there you were also saving your games on cassette! Then loading a saved game would go like that: rewind the tape a bit, load a save game, no, is not the one you wanted but older, try the next one…
Also, remember the ‘game loaders’ which modified the tape loading routines, so you have different colored lines on the background on tour display, maybe a counter, maybe a different order for drawing the screen… fun times.
Oh, and also the utilities to copy games from one cassette to another!
There was another British TV programme, Data Base, which had programs downloadable through audio tones as well. There are a few clips of it on YouTube but here’s one from the early 80s, I think, of a couple using their BBC Micro and Prestel to send email, but the audio download is at the end of the programme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szdbKz5CyhA
Couldn’t help but notice the very ladylike presenter — this was at the time when computers being marketed as toys for boys but this focussed on older people including women. I wondered if it was black and white until I saw her pink skirt.
I admit I don’t remember doing this in Bristol on July 1983, but that’s because I had just turned 4 years old.
Given data cassettes were purely FM, this makes sense. AM would have introduced noise and lost too much frequency domain information.
Edited 2018-06-08 21:12 UTC
Maybe true, but it worked. Back about 1986? 1985? Radio 2GO in Gosford NSW used to have a 04:30AM radio show that did this for MicroBee computers. There was three programs. One at the beginning was always a basic game, the middle was something advanced, the final one was a random thing. We lived 12km from the transmitter tower, and it worked pretty reliably on my cassette deck and Bee. The only time I think it didn’t was during a thunder storm.
I distinctly remenber that a big department store near where we lived had a big tray of casette games (unsealed!) next to a huge wall of fully working double casette decks on display. Those were the times!