Lemmy Fans
  • Communities
  • Create Post
  • Create Community
  • heart
    Support Lemmy
  • search
    Search
  • Login
  • Sign Up
spzb@infosec.pub to retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish · 1 month ago

Yes, in the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

newslttrs.com

external-link
message-square
32
link
fedilink
  • cross-posted to:
  • [email protected]
  • [email protected]
199
external-link

Yes, in the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

newslttrs.com

spzb@infosec.pub to retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish · 1 month ago
message-square
32
link
fedilink
  • cross-posted to:
  • [email protected]
  • [email protected]
So there I was, minding my own business, doom-scrolling my way through Facebook posts when I happened upon one that hit me straight in the nostalgia. A photo of a 1980s home computer, a cassette player and some tapes. The text underneath proclaimed "In the 1980s, people could download video
alert-triangle
You must log in or register to comment.
  • evidences@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    49
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 month ago

    I mean technically speaking if you’re connected on wifi you still are…

    • Øπ3ŕ@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 month ago

      Came to say exactly this. 🤦🏼‍♂️ Kids these days.

      • SupaTuba@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        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.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    1 month ago

    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.

    • agentshags@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      15
      ·
      1 month ago

      Phreaky

    • AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 month ago

      Jokes on you nobody under the age of 50 has seen Hackers

      • trolololol@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 month ago

        I’m barely under 50 and never heard of this. And I watched mcgiver as a kid.

  • Hikermick@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    1 month ago

    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

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 month ago

      A VIC-20 was my first computer and I had never heard of this! Had to do the same with a magazine.

  • macniel@feddit.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    1 month ago

    And Programs/Games came on Casettes :)

    • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      You had cassettes? We had to manually transcribe machine code from printed listings.

      • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        17
        ·
        1 month ago

        Just in case, no it’s not a joke.

        Examle: Book - 101 BASIC games: https://archive.org/details/101basiccomputer0000davi

        • macniel@feddit.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 month ago

          well yeah and because you don’t want to type the listing down all over again, you save it onto tape.

  • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    1 month ago

    See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview

    • macniel@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      1 month ago

      and its predecessor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System

  • espentan@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    1 month ago

    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.

  • Scroll Responsibly@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    1 month ago

    We do now too… it’s called WiFi 😅

    • niktemadur@lemmy.worldBanned
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      30 days ago

      Removed by mod

      • SupaTuba@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 month ago

        Yeah I’m really confused why people keep saying it’s the same thing. It’s not, aside from being over-the-air at some point in the transmission.

  • turtle [he/him]@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 month ago

    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. :)

  • ch00f@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 month ago

    Didn’t some magazines ship software with plastic records that could be played on a conventional record player?

    • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 month ago

      Yes, they are called flexi discs.

  • doingthestuff@lemy.lol
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 month ago

    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.

  • hossein@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 month ago

    So cool, thanks for sharing.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    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.

  • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 month ago

    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.

    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      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!

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        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.

  • Harvey656@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 month ago

    Someone once argues with me on here that downloading updates and games in the late 90s wasn’t real. This is very gratifying lol.

    • meliante@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 month ago

      Downloading updates for what?

      • Harvey656@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        Diablo is what I remember.

        • meliante@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 month ago

          Really? I don’t really remember any game that received updates back when, but I didn’t play diablo.

  • Uranus_Hz@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    It never really worked for me. I don’t recall ever being able to successfully use a cassette tape as a software storage medium.

retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org

retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org

Subscribe from Remote Instance

Create a post
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]

Discussions on vintage and retrocomputing

Visibility: Public
globe

This community can be federated to other instances and be posted/commented in by their users.

  • 3 users / day
  • 113 users / week
  • 474 users / month
  • 2.57K users / 6 months
  • 2 local subscribers
  • 4.73K subscribers
  • 416 Posts
  • 1.58K Comments
  • Modlog
  • mods:
  • SDF@lemmy.sdf.org
  • Nathan Byrd@lemmy.sdf.org
  • Penkster@lemmy.sdf.org
  • BE: 0.19.11
  • Modlog
  • Instances
  • Docs
  • Code
  • join-lemmy.org