RetroGaming

Nearly as unbelievable, the other way to distribute software was to publish in gaming magazines.

Yes, all the code was printed onto the pages of a magazine. And then young nerds bought these magazines and spent days or weeks manually typing in and debugging the hundreds of lines of BASIC to run some game. And then the magazine would be passed onto the next nerd, like comics and pornography.

My own miserable system was a TI 99/4a with a cassette player for data storage. It sounded like a dial-up modem. I typed in a lot of programs and stored them on tapes. Then I started tearing the developed work apart and building my own stuff. It was years before I could call myself a programmer. (I was twelve.) Line-number BASIC sorta ruined me, actually. Learning about object-oriented functions was quite difficult after starting out with GOTO and GOSUB.

I updated the calendar function on my watch with a windows 3.1 program that flashed the screen black- and- white in an epileptic nightmare.

You put your watch into update mode, and then held the face towards the computer screen.

Edit: behold the Timex Datalink

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink

Had never heard of this, and my first computer had a tape drive. Went to a tiny computer camp and we had a sweet D&D game, but it took 10-minutes to load, if it didn't fuck up. Had to start it before our break or we'd only have 5 minutes to play.

This is fascinating to me, such a shame that these PCs didn't reach my country back then, I've never ever seen one personally, not even in videogame museums.

Reminds me of TV remotes that worked with sound. Both before my time but very interesting to read about.

This reminds me that I once read about a Thompson Twins game that was distributed as a flexi disc record. In order to actually play the game it had to be copied to a cassette first. Apparently it's pretty rare, since it was only available as a bonus with a specific issue of a magazine.

It's so gratifying to hear from people on the internet who are older than I am. And this article reads like it bounced off a Listserv to a yahoo email address.

As Wi-Fi is a form of radio technology, we still basically do this today.

videogames killed the radio star.

About 20 years ago, there was an art/tech project for distributing Linux Source code by radio. Probably not very practical in reality, but a lovely concept.

I'm pretty sure WiFi is a kind of radio signal...