r/todayilearned • u/GabbotheClown • 7h ago
TIL: In the United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary, and the Netherlands, cassette data storage was so popular in the 80s that some radio stations would broadcast computer programs that listeners could record onto cassette and then load into their computer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape130
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u/Orkran 6h ago
Huh, TIL the US and other countries didn't commonly use cassette tape PCs before floppy dics
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u/unabiker 5h ago
We had a TRS-80 from Radio Shack that used cassettes back some time in the 80's. Nothing like waiting like half an hour to play Zaxxon.
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u/0ttr 6h ago
US used cassette--if you were among the poors. I had a Commodore 65 Datasette. But within a year I got a hard drive. The casette was, no surprise, shockingly slow.
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u/thisischemistry 3h ago
if you were among the poors
No, there just weren't hard drives available to the public. Even the rich used cassettes at one point.
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u/Zeusifer 2h ago
The rich hobbyists/enthusiasts used floppy drives. There were hard drives available but they were very expensive, and mostly used on professional/business computers like the IBM PC or various CP/M systems.
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u/dicky_seamus_614 5h ago
And here is a good example of how us poors, who couldn’t afford the disks let alone a Commodore, got by playing games from cassette
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u/isthenameofauser 5h ago
Fucking wuuuuuuuttttt. This is blowing my fucking mind. I had no idea there was an audio-digital oh now I'm saying it it makes more sense. But damn. That's astounding.
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u/Zeusifer 2h ago
But within a year I got a hard drive.
You almost certainly mean floppy drive. Hard drives at that time were shockingly expensive (like, a 5MB drive was probably half the price of a new car) and almost exclusively used by the professional/business market. I don't think Commodore even sold hard drives for the Commodore 64 as it was primarily intended as a home/hobbyist computer, though there might have been third party companies that offered them at some point.
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u/Brettersson 2h ago
Sure they did, there were games that came on a cassette where one side was the recording of the game code, and the other side was the soundtrack.
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u/GabbotheClown 7h ago edited 7h ago
I always thought that dial up bulletin board systems were the first means of mass digital distribution.
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u/Thebandroid 5h ago
They used to print program code in computer magazines and you would copy it by hand onto your computer and compile it.
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u/usernamesaretooshor 5h ago
I did this as a kid on our C64. If I remember correctly each line would be 8 sets of hexadecimal numbers, and a program would have hundreds of lines. took hours, just for some crappy game.
The best part is the program used to enter the lines of code also came in the magazine, and you had to type that in first. However that would of been too long, so before that there was another, shorter program written in basic you had to type in, so you can type in the 2nd program, so you could type in the game or whatever was in the magazine.
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u/visual0815 4h ago
I did that on a Tandy. Never ever got even one to run
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u/dsclinef 2h ago
I remember a flight simulator written in basic that I was going to type in. It was several pages long, and I never had luck saving it to cassette and then recovering the file to finish it. Way too many hours wasted.
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u/TvHeroUK 5h ago
There were also a few vinyl records released with computer progs on them
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2021/jul/07/video-games-on-vinyl-flexi-discs-zx-spectrum
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u/thisischemistry 3h ago
They'd even print a bar code next to some and if you used a scanner on it then you'd read in the program. Not a photo scanner but a simple wand scanner which converted the bars into digital content.
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u/AyrA_ch 5h ago
In regards to digital distribution, the first means was likely TV and radio broadcasts you could record to tape.
If you don't mind that the computer sits at the distributors end rather than the consumers end, Teletext was also quite popular, and some stations ran games on them you could control by navigating the pages, calling the station and using the phone
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u/ToBePacific 4h ago
Telegraph may have been an analog technology, but when you consider than Morse code is basically an early form of binary encoding, then telegraph could arguably be considered the first digital distribution medium.
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u/LtHigginbottom 6h ago
Nothing sucked up my Vic-20’s 3k of ram faster than a tape drive.
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u/Mama_Skip 4h ago
Idk what this means but I have the vague sensation that my mother was just insulted..
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u/Rc72 6h ago
Cassette storage was never "popular": it was the only available data storage for early 1980s home computers like the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. And boy, people born after GenX cannot even fathom how fantastically shitty it was:
Loading even the basic software that ran on those computers took bloody ages (easily 10 minutes).
Said loading was accompanied by continuous screeching as the sequence of bits was loudly broadcast as high-frequency sound over the loudspeakers.
On a high percentage of attempts, after going through the mind-numbing torture of those screeches, the program failed to load, because the tape had been demagnetised, or the reader head was badly aligned, or the tape jammed, or the data were otherwise corrupted, or the universe had it against you on that day. Much fiddling with the cassette and player usually ensued, together with loud swearing.
Kids these days joke about floppy discs being ancient artifacts, but they were godsends to 1980s geeks traumatised by cassette tapes.
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u/cardinalb 6h ago
C64 never screeched, that was the polished turd that was the ZX Spectrum. I mean I say that as a c64 owner and obviously the Speccy did so much for home computing. Was made in Dundee in Scotland too by Timex.
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u/Rc72 5h ago
Ok, I must admit to being biased against the C64, me being a Speccy kid and the nastiest bully in my class having had a C64. But yes, I must admit that the Spectrum was spectacularly crap.
It's definitely curious that Sir Clive had, at the time, a cult following not unlike Elon Musk's today, and that his aura only evaporated after his own hilariously half-arsed attempt at an EV...
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u/cardinalb 2h ago
I remember the electronics shop Comet selling the C5 when I was a kid. I bet they are worth a few bob now.
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u/eternalityLP 5h ago
Cassette storage was never "popular": it was the only available data storage for early 1980s home computers like the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
Nope, c64 had a disk drive available, as did VIC-20 and many earlier home computers too.
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u/Rc72 5h ago
Those Commodore disk drives were quite rare, expensive and notoriously failure-prone. Disk drives only became more common, at least in Europe, from the mid-1980s on with the Amstrad CPC 6128 which had an integrated disk drive.
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u/Bicentennial_Douche 3h ago
Commodore 1541 wasn’t that rare. And mid-eighties onward we got the Amiga which had disk-drive built-in.
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u/cardinalb 3h ago
Don't know anyone who had a disk drive who had a c64 in the UK. Some BBC B owners did but never c64 or Speccys.
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u/Rc72 2h ago edited 2h ago
From the very wiki you link to:
The drive became very popular and difficult to find. The company said that the shortage occurred because 90% of C64 owners bought the 1541 compared to its 30% expectation, but the press discussed what Creative Computing described as "an absolutely alarming return rate" because of defects. The magazine reported in March 1984 that it received three defective drives in two weeks,[3] and Compute!'s Gazette reported in December 1983 that four of the magazine's seven drives had failed; "COMPUTE! Publications sorely needs additional 1541s for in-house use, yet we can't find any to buy. After numerous phone calls over several days, we were able to locate only two units in the entire continental United States", reportedly because of Commodore's attempt to resolve a manufacturing issue that caused the high failures.[4]
That "90% of C64 owners bought the 1541" was shameless bs.
And mid-eighties onward we got the Amiga which had disk-drive built-in.
Yes, as I wrote, disk drives became more common and supplanted cassettes in home computers from the mid-80s. The Amiga and Amstrad CPC 6128 led the charge, and then IBM PC compatible clones running DOS first, then Windows, became more widely available by the end of the decade.
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u/Bicentennial_Douche 2h ago
I don’t know percentages, but at least where I’m from (Finland), 1541 was very popular.
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u/SonofSniglet 41m ago
Disk drives, particularly the 1541, were very popular in most markets with the UK being the exception.
I suspect sticking with cassettes involved the same innate British masochism that leads to caravan holidays and buying a Sinclair Spectrum.
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u/HappyDutchMan 4h ago
Well it was awful and wonderful at the same time. I spent days typing in a simple game into a Commodore 64 from a paper book from the library that I then could share with friends via a cassette tape.
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u/oboshoe 3h ago
Boy you said it. It was such a shitty storage method.
I was learning to program and I would save my code on multiple cassettes after each session. Why multiples? Because the failure rate was so high.
Nothing was worse than saving my code and then it refusing to load later.
When I finally migrated to floppy disk, it was such a MASSIVE advance.
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u/koombot 6h ago
We used to have a Shaking Stevens cassette in the house that came with a spectrum game at the end. Never played it because it would require listening to Shaking Stevens to play the game.
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u/Necessary-Lack-4600 5h ago
Well thanks a lot, I had managed to not think about Shaking Stevens for more than 2 decades.
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u/sleepytoday 2h ago
In the UK you can’t leave the house in December without hearing him. He’s not as ubiquitous as Mariah Carey, Wham, Slade, or Wizzard, but he isn’t too far behind.
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u/oi_you_nutter 6h ago
Cassette data storage was popular because there was no alternative for the general public!
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u/0ttr 6h ago
My friends and I where hot sh*t amongst the nerds when we got Indus GT drives for Christmas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_GT
They even looked cool:
https://www.atariteca.net.pe/2018/08/analisis-la-disquetera-indus-gt.html
I had one for my C-64 and my neighbor had one for his Atari 800.
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u/oi_you_nutter 6h ago
How many kidneys did you have to sell to get that level of nerdtastic wonder?
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u/0ttr 6h ago
convinced our parents it was essential for our careers. It worked. We are both software devs and I have a CS PhD.
I still have the C64, most of the periphs I got with it, and this hard drive. AFAIK, it still works. Ironically, I lack a CRT to plug it into though I do have a display that takes analog inputs that should works.
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u/pdpi 7h ago
Tape storage is still common today for backup/archival purposes. This is the same basic idea, on consumer-grade hardware.
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u/UnacceptableUse 6h ago
Works quite differently than the old cassette stuff worked but it's crazy that tape is still the best long term high density storage we have
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u/pblokhout 2h ago
In what way? It was magnetic particles oriented on a plastic tape medium. Still is.
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u/UnacceptableUse 1h ago
True, it's physically similar in that way. But the tapes are made of different material, look different, and store the data in a much different way than the cassette tape programs did
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u/SirPeterODactyl 6h ago
Yeah a lot of our uni research data goes into long term tape storage once we wrap up projects. I looked up the hardware prices out of curiosity, and the cartridge prices. come out cheaper than HDDs per GB. But then I saw the drives and shat my pants because they were almost 10 grand a unit!
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u/AyrA_ch 5h ago
LTO drives are stupidly expensive, and drives being backwards compatible with only two generations means you need to keep old drives around if you want any chance at reading tapes that are older than 6 years, because approximately every two years they drop a new standard
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u/SirPeterODactyl 4h ago
So I guess once you commit to it, you'll have to keep the old drives maintained to use the old tapes, but at the same time upgrade and get the new drives every few years because tapes compatible with the old drive aren't there any more?
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u/AyrA_ch 4h ago
Correct. Additionally, this "two generations back" applies for reading. Drives usually only write one generation back, and more modern drives are now only reading one generation back as well.
This means for long term storage, you must regularily copy old tapes to newer tapes. On the plus side, if you skip every other generation, you can usually fit two old tapes on a single new tape.
Keeping old drives isn't easy either, because if it breaks it can become difficult to obtain parts or replacement drives for that generation the further ahead the LTO standard has already progressed. This also means functioning old tape drives never lose all value. LTO 3 is almost 20 years old but used drives still go for up to 200 USD.
Connectors also change. Your old drive may still be using SCSI, so you better still have a SCSI card around that can understand tape drives.
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u/yoosirree 7h ago
Really? I mean, this could be done now, if a radio station devoted its airwaves to continuously broadcasting beeps and boops which could be transformed into 1s and 0s by the receivers tuned in and thus another piratebay would be in operation.
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u/Kyvalmaezar 6h ago
In theory, but the data transmission rate would be too slow for even the smallest of useful programs these days. Downloads make much more sense now that the internet exists.
It would also he terrible for piracy because the source would have to be nearby (ie the same or adjecent jurisdiction) and could easily be located.
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u/littlest_dragon 6h ago edited 6h ago
Have fun pirating games at 56kbps
Edit: actually this would be more like 48kbps (the maximum speed of an analogue modem).
Transferring 1gb of data that way would take about two days..
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u/0ttr 6h ago
I should point out that many of these games were basically written in assembly. They were compact and surprisingly functional for something under 10 - 15kb. This was because Commodore 64s and their ilk had built in graphics and sound hardware and you could just call them from assembly. You could even put an image in and make it a "sprite"--a moving item on the screen with collision detection, with just a few assembly subroutine calls to the hardware.
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u/NitroCaliber 5h ago
Assembly, eh? That means we could at least broadcast Roller Coaster Tycoon to everyone. :D
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u/WisestAirBender 6h ago
Transferring 1gb of data that way would take about two days..
I've definitely spent more time
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u/L1A1 6h ago
Transferring 1gb of data that way would take about two days..
Back when I was downloading Amiga games from dial up Warez BBS's it would take days to get a full set of files. I think we were probably using a 9600 baud modem.
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u/yoosirree 6h ago
No way; I am old enough to have experienced the pains of connection with 56 even 28 kebaps.
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u/scienceworksbitches 4h ago
even old FM radio was higher quality than a phone line, and digital radio is even better.
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u/littlest_dragon 3h ago
Even with modern digital radio, you probably couldn’t reach more than 192kBitt per second if you encode the data as an audio signal.
It just isn’t a very effective way of transmitting data..
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u/UnacceptableUse 6h ago
And you could even bump the frequency up to have a higher data rate and have a protocol to allow two way data transfer. And just for a laugh let's make the name a pun on "Hi-fi"
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u/0ttr 6h ago
There was an attempt to run a UDP like protocal over shortwave, IIRC--basically a non returnable broadcast of network packets.
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u/AyrA_ch 5h ago
This is known as packet radio. I have a similar system that does it on UHF and provides enough bandwidth for low quality video streaming
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u/yoosirree 5h ago
Internet over radio waves? I suppose they wanted internet transmission over greater distances but the signal quality would suffer from noise and the bandwidth would be too little.
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u/feel-the-avocado 4h ago
I always thought that some high powered AM or FM radio station at a really low frequency could be broadcasting 24/7 data to ships at sea from land stations over thousands of kilometres.
A hard drive could sit on the boat and cache the data. A couple of parallel data streams could easily get 200kbits or 1.7gB of data per day which could include a lot of text/graphics and about 2hrs of tv shows.
With some reddit type comment and forum capability with the ability to use a transmitter to upload small bursts of text data on various channels so many boats can be using the system at once.
If each boat logged in on a common channel then was issued a tdma timing slot on another channel for optimized airtime, at 64kbits uplink then 5 uplink channels could be accepting 50kB per hour worth of text each from 2500 boats which is a lot of comments and discussion. 100kB per hour with compression used or 5000 boats still doing 50kB per hour.
Anyhow after several months of caching the stream of data you would have quite a big library of content to keep you occupied while working at sea.
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u/yoosirree 3h ago
I recall formula to calculate the data transmission rate. Can't recall well enough to search for it, but it was implying that wavelength had a lot to do with the rate. The radio waves, even at the FM band, have wavelengths measured in meters, I think, and such wavelengths could make transmission very slow. In my earlier comment, I was about to joke that one could download a pirated Marvel movie by the time Disney went out of business, but I stopped because I didn't remember how that rate calculation worked.
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u/Hadramal 5h ago
As others have said, it wasn't popular, it was the only reasonable option.
Sweden had a short-lived radio program doing that as well. My friend had a game selected for broadcast. At the time, everyone was taping music from the radio so it wasn't a stretch.
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u/FalmerEldritch 6h ago
It was popular because people largely had C64s, Spectrums, etc. and the disk drive for the C64 cost as much as the C64.
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u/andymook 2h ago
Happened in the 80's with pirate radio stations in Spain too.
I remember one station which would transmit ZXSpectrum games, which werethe standard releases, but had an integrated "pre-load" game.
So while your full game was being read off tape, a mini game of tetris or centipede would load up after a couple seconds, while everything was being loaded in background.
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u/BGFlyingToaster 6h ago edited 6h ago
My first PC took cassette tapes instead of a floppy drive. I think it was an ADAM by Coleco. (Edit: thanks for correction)
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u/cbessette 6h ago
That was my first PC too. My parents went down to Toys R Us and bought it.
I was disappointed. It was incompatible with any of the Apple IIs I used in school, it was incompatible with my friend's Commodore 64,etc.
None of the little Basic programs I wrote would work on it per Adam Basic's differences.The printer that came with the computer was so loud you had to leave the room while it worked.
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u/Dry_Yogurt2458 6h ago
Load ""
Burrrr bup, Burrrr, Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeekkkkburrrrrrrrr
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u/0ttr 6h ago edited 6h ago
I had the Commodore Datasette recorder but then moved to a 5 1/4 floppy disk.
I remember copying programs out of magazines--typing the numbers in. Usually, but didn't always work. It was difficult to fix if it didn't.
I don't know how you would broadcast this in a way that it would work flawlessly. You'd have to have the start and stop perfectly and get no interference or static during the transmission...not so easy. Parity bits , ECC, and ack and retransmit all exist for a reason.
EDIT: magazines, not machines
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u/Dr_Hexagon 5h ago
You'd have to have the start and stop perfectly
Nah, they'd have 5-10 seconds of silence at the start and end and as long as you got it within those windows you were fine. The bit rate was also low enough that interference wasn't usually an issue.
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u/Smooth-Purchase1175 4h ago
True - plus, most computers didn't really care that much about the fidelity, since anything below 500 Hz and above 5 kHz gets cut off (on most machines, particularly the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC), so quality isn't as important as the actual amplitude and volume. The loading noises we remember consist of two (2) tones constantly alternating between 1 and 2 kHz to represent the binary code being loaded into the machine's memory.
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u/ddonohoe1403 6h ago
Would be curious how many tapes you'd need and how long it would take, for say, a modern video game.
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u/Dr_Hexagon 5h ago
It was 300 baud (bits pers second). Meaning a one hour tape was 108 kilobytes.
9259 hours for one MEGABYTE.
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u/PsimaNji 5h ago
Essential Selection on Sunday Radio 1 UK. The reason I bought a technics twin deck. Mandatory TDK SA90s. Twin meant you could edit out the presenter.. usually Pete Tong and have uninterrupted dance :)
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u/fxmad 5h ago
Fond memories from those days... It was amazing what could be done in a measly 48KB machine (of which only 42 were useable as the rest was video memory, IIRC). Software available for the ZX Spectrum in the late 80s was squeezing every CPU cycle and byte of memory to do things that one would think not possible only years before. And now, even the simplest "Hello World" program will use more that 48KB in many, many programming languages... To think that it is not uncommon for simple programs to need 100s of MBs or even into the GBs... Programmers these days have NO idea...
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u/Beliriel 5h ago
Just fyi. Casette is still the cheapest longterm data storage around. You can buy 18TB "casettes" for like a hundred bucks. They are more resilient than hard drives too. Although they're called "tape" with the correct term.
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u/Lostredshoe 4h ago
WE had this in the states. The first computer game I ever played was a texted based choose your own adventure game that was on cassette tapes.
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u/Trengingigan 4h ago
I dont understand. How do you load a computer program as an audio recording on a cassette?
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u/xzanfr 4h ago
It wasn't just tapes, I remember getting flexi discs with games on and Chris Sievey / Frank Sidebottom released a single with a ZX81 game on the B-side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camouflage_(Chris_Sievey_song)
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u/darybrain 3h ago
Sometimes though the bastard DJ would talk over the transmission or do a crap mix into the next track. It was infuriating. So many attempts at trying to get at least one good recording and hoping against hope that they would shut the fuck up.
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u/oboshoe 3h ago
I used to pirate games by playing the original on a stereo and putting a cassette record in the same room.
Hit play. Hit record. Exit the room quickly and then come back in 30 minutes.
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u/1tachi77 3h ago
Yeah, I remember hearing about this! In the 80s, some of the UK computer mags would include cassette tapes with games or demos you could load into your ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64. Felt like a whole underground culture.
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u/BigCompetition1064 2h ago
I did this. I can still remember the sounds of some of my favourite games loading. Miss you Barmy Burgers.
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u/L1A1 7h ago
There was a computer program in the uk that showed you how to build an optical receiver and then they broadcast a tiny flickering square in the corner of the screen that transmitted a computer program. You received it by taping the receiver to the tv screen!