Was downloading games off the radio really a thing? It certainly was. Standard cassette tapes were a commonplace storage medium (especially in Europe, where the expense of disk drives was a tougher sell), and FM radio was capable of broadcasting the audio encoding. "Yes, in the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio," writes Simon.
Then I started to read the comments underneath and people were flat-out denying that this had ever happened. The reply guys broadly fell into two camps: the "I have never heard of this, therefore it never happened" and the over confident "expert" saying things like "this would be technically impossible due to some fancy sounding words I've heard like 'hertz', 'compression' and 'frequency shift keying', therefore it never happened".
Just to make sure I was in a spluttering rage the page itself was titled "Unbelievable facts" as if my own childhood had become unbelievable. Although now I think about it it was an unbelievably long time ago, so maybe they have a point.
I remember trying it but not succeeding. Simon writes that the BBC adopted and refined a simplified cross-platform dialect of BASIC which required specialized interpreter apps, which would have been out of the question for 8-year-old me. Trying to make it work for all made it inaccessible to most—easier just to copy tapes!
Previously: Programming language BASIC is 60 years old
