I mean technically speaking if you're connected on wifi you still are....
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
200 points (99.0% liked)
retrocomputing
4633 readers
45 users here now
Discussions on vintage and retrocomputing
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Came to say exactly this. π€¦πΌββοΈ Kids these days.
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 π€¦π»ββοΈ
- Gen Z
Edit: Looks like he didn't like the taste of his own ageism.
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.
Jokes on you nobody under the age of 50 has seen Hackers
I'm barely under 50 and never heard of this. And I watched mcgiver as a kid.
Phreaky
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
A VIC-20 was my first computer and I had never heard of this! Had to do the same with a magazine.
And Programs/Games came on Casettes :)
You had cassettes? We had to manually transcribe machine code from printed listings.
Just in case, no it's not a joke.
Examle: Book - 101 BASIC games: https://archive.org/details/101basiccomputer0000davi
well yeah and because you don't want to type the listing down all over again, you save it onto tape.
I have a 40 year old book about TI BASIC somewhere in the garage plus some magazines with games. I built a fantasy game and saved it to cassette.
For a ti-99/4a? Me too! It was my favorite thing (up until my dad bought a used 286 from work, then skipped a few generations and went right to a Pentium 133)
That's the one! It's also in the garage. Still worked a while back when I hooked it up through a few adapters.
I always dumpster dived for computers. My buddy showed me where to go and when so we'd upgrade every year together when one of the local junior colleges threw out a bunch of stuff. We were always a few years behind but we had more tech toys than folks on the edge of poverty had the chance to pick up back in those days.
I remember being a teen in the late 90s with some computers to use and some to sell and we ended up selling enough to both get Bigfoot drives. A couple of gigs was MASSIVE compared to the TI stuff we both started on.
He's still got the tax software with the booklet and ads featuring Bill Cosby running around somewhere. He's also got a tattoo of the motherboard of the TI-99/4a because he said without it he wouldn't be where he is today. But he doesn't like Bill Cosby anymore.
I always dumpster dived for computers.
We played the same game! Thats how I ended up with a DEC pizza box (multia with an alpha 166 processor) and a SparcStation. Then I'd take them over with me to the computer show (it was more like a flea market, its unfortunate they no longer exist) after I played with them to trade - thats how I was able to get my hands on a 1x (yes you read that right) CD burner.
Good times!
Same, except we had a cyrix processor
That was my followup to the P133, a Cyrix MII chip (when they added MMX to the series), with the 266mhz chip! Ran like shit π. I think I replaced that with a K6.
Those were... Quickly changing times haha
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.
We do now tooβ¦ itβs called WiFi π
WiFi being in the microwave range of the spectrum, surely it packs information much more densely and efficiently than lower wavelength frequencies like radio ever can.
But then WiFi can't turn a goddamned corner and into another room ten yards away.
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.
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. :)
Didnβt some magazines ship software with plastic records that could be played on a conventional record player?
for a while they sent websites over the tv signal. i forgot how it was called tho. you needed a tv tuner card to receive it on your pc
Are you referring to Teletext, or something else?
That reminds me. They did used to broadcast software over teletext over TV https://teletext.mb21.co.uk/gallery/ceefax/telesoftware/
There was also a system where some TV screen pixels were used to send data, but I'm struggling to remember how you were supposed to get it into the computer.
I suspect that you needed to build some light sensor with a serial cable, that you held to the screen, but I'm not sure.
This was in the Netherlands, not sure if it was done elsewhere.
I had heard of this but your comment sent me searching for more info. I think you might be referring to Visicode.
https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1985-07/page/286/mode/2up?q=visicode
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxo1Gs46ti0
https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1985-08/page/194/mode/2up?q=visicode
That looks interesting, but it's not ringing any bells.
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.
So cool, thanks for sharing.
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.
Someone once argues with me on here that downloading updates and games in the late 90s wasn't real. This is very gratifying lol.
Downloading updates for what?
Diablo is what I remember.
Really? I don't really remember any game that received updates back when, but I didn't play diablo.
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 didnβt work.
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!
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.
It never really worked for me. I donβt recall ever being able to successfully use a cassette tape as a software storage medium.