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Comment by p0w3n3d | Hacker News Reader

In my country they used to broadcast software for Atari 800 over radio - and it worked...

In the Netherlands they used to broadcast software as part of the Hobbyscoop radio show. It was generic BASIC code that could run on a variety of home computers, requiring a small loader program for conversion. The project was named BASICODE[1].

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

Here's the ZX Spectrum version: https://www.racunalniski-muzej.si/en/40-years-later-a-game-f...

Back in 1980's the Finnish public broadcaster YLE used to broadcast Commodore 64 software in their radio show Silikoni. They actually have a recording the first such episode available online at https://yle.fi/a/20-108142 - of course, this is in Finnish.

It was not a very reliable method but it did work if you had good FM reception and a high quality tape deck. I guess it helps that the data rate is only 300 bits per second or so.

In Poland, in the communist period, the national broadcaster used to do it. For Atari, ZX Spectrum, Commmodore 64.

Haven't heard the audition, though. Well before my era.

It’s crazy that you had access to these technologies during communist period.

Growing up in USSR I didn’t know anyone who would own a PC up until early 90s.

PC-s were only described in hobby magazines, like Bajtek or Młody Technik. Nobody had them, though, except maybe some institutions. The hobbyists used to own ZX Spectrum or Commondore 64, but even that was rare.

I know one programmer in his 50s. He had an access to the ZX Spectrum in his primary school, but that was by effort of his local physics teacher.

Yeh, that’s pretty much aligns with what I remember.

But I don’t get it then - why would they broadcast software for devices no one had?

Could it be that the handful of people with computer access were well connected & well regarded, & the people running the radio broadcasts wanted to cater to them especially? I'd imagine there could be some sense of personal & national pride & prestige around supporting these emerging technologies & promoting them to the public. (I'm just guessing though - I wasn't there & haven't studied the topic in depth.)

My guess would be that the broadcaster had one geek who pushed for that. Fellow geeks had software over the radio, the broadcaster had an opinion of a modern one, keeping up with the newest tech. Win-win.

I'm not (yet) in my 50s (though close). I used to have a C64 back in the day. I wrote write a few things in its horrible BASIC dialect. Probably the most advanced was a database (not relational, just one table, but kept separately from the source, of course on an audio cassette).

That device had ridiculous capabilities. The sound chip was good enough people wrote a speech synthesis software. Later, people wrote a graphical OS, with e.g. a text editor being an equivalent of Windows Write from the 90s.

I still have some old Amiga backups on VHS. Worked too… :)

Nice! Hi-fi VHS audio, or using one of those encoders that would pack the data into pixels?

Pixels. You can watch it as video (some old-school animated "QR Code" type of stuff :) )