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Comment by shrx | Hacker News Reader

My family lived in Yugoslavia near the Italian border within a zone where people were issued special passports allowing them to go across the border to the west. This was not generally possible, so people took advantage of it and bought (or smuggled to avoid trouble with the customs) many goods which were not available inside the country, like jeans, washing machines, vinyl records, ... My uncle brought both the ZX spectrum and the Commodore back with him on one of such trips. And then during that time our student radio station used to play whole computer programs and games live on air, and everybody could record them to a cassette and load them on their computer, for free!

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That's interesting - do you have any more info on this special passport zone, or travel to the west being generally not possible?

Yugoslav passports from 40 years ago are widely regarded as being one of the most powerful passports ever, with visa-free travel to almost all Western states [0].

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/o7mJrRuWOu

I lived in the same area as the GP, and the thing about not being able to go to the west with regular passports is false. In fact people from all over Yugoslavia went shopping to Trieste in Italy.

The special passports did exist however, and were issued to residents of what used to be the Free Territory of Trieste[0], both in Italy and Yugoslavia. They were established by the Udine Agreement of 1955 (although the border was still disputed and finally settled only in 1975 by the Treaty of Osimo[1]).

I can't find many sources about the special passports online. There is a mention here[2].

Their main advantage was the possibility of using secondary border crossings between Italy and Yugoslavia that had less traffic and shorter queues.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Territory_of_Trieste

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Osimo

[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/urban-history/articl...

Hi, thanks for clarification, I was not aware that other Yugoslavian residents were able to cross the border as freely as those with the special passport ("Propustnica").

There were similar "passport lite" cross border documents in other parts of Yugoslavia, allowing people living in border regions to easily pass the border but limited to maybe 10-20km in another country. These passes were used by farmers who had pieces of land across the border, or even if land was in the same country the closest road might be through border. I think something like that still exists.

There was a school bus route in Washington that passed through Canada on its way to the school that got really screwed by the post-9/11 stricter border controls.

Thanks for your comment.

Could you elaborate a bit on the “recording and loading cassette” part?

I’m really wondering!

Cassette tapes doubled as music storage and data storage for machines like ZX Spectrum and C64. You could just copy software like you would copy a music cassette. Code via radio would be as easy as playing a song. Another time long gone computer magazines would print code that you could enter yourself! Before that Sussman is reported to meditate on code, and acolytes where supposed to create machines that could run that code.

Here are some details about the ZX Spectrum tape interface:

http://www.zxdesign.info/cassette.shtml

https://sinclair.wiki.zxnet.co.uk/wiki/Spectrum_tape_interfa...

Pretty much all the early 8-bit computers had cassette storage. On the Apple ][ series, the interface to write to the cassette was identical to the speaker interface so you could load audio into memory from a cassette and play it back (at 1-bit resolution) on the internal speaker of the Apple ][. It sounded like crap (although a lot of cassette decks did too) but seemed like magic.

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