[bluGill]

Not just that we expect to, we can. Back in the day you could download them as well, but it costs a lot of money: someone had to pay for the computer and phone line and then one computer per phone line was common. It also took a long time to download files at 300 baud, and often you were paying long distance rates to the phone company (which was far more expensive than long distance rates now despite inflation). Most of us were using audio cassettes to store our programs on, dreaming of a floppy disk that held 80k... (we knew hard drives existed, but they were so expensive that we didn't dare dream of them)

While it was possible to buy a multi-user computer, or a connection to the internet, we didn't even know such a thing existed. Not that it mattered, as practically the cost was far our of reach.

[laumars]

I'm guessing where you live radio stations / TV shows didn't air the data noise of BASIC code like they sometimes did in the UK?

You could record it straight onto your audio cassette (like you would record any song on the radio) then play that on your BBC Micro.

It was cheap, accessible and effectively the analogue equivolent of downloading.

[bluGill]

I never heard of that until much latter. There wasn't a dominate computer platform: as a kid I knew people with Apple II, C64, Atari, or TI. They were not compatible in general, so it doesn't really make sense to air such things. Even assuming the recording would work, my memory of cassette systems is they rarely worked. I typically saved everything to 3 different tapes to have a hope of reading back correctly eventually.

[laumars]

There wasn't a dominant platform in the UK either. We had multiple machines from Acorn (inc BBC Micro), Sinclair, Dragon and Amstrad plus the Commedores and Atari's you had too.

I don't think Apple really came to Europe until much later.

[cr0sh]

> we knew hard drives existed, but they were so expensive that we didn't dare dream of them

I was from a slightly later generation (I think); I got my first machine in 1984. I knew hard drives existed too - a 10 meg system would only cost about $8000.00 back then that would connect to my machine (TRS-80 CoCo 2). Sigh.

As far as "multi-user" was concerned - well, we had OS-9 - if one could afford it (plus you needed a dual-floppy system if you didn't want to be swapping all the time). It could support multiple users, but it needed some special hardware for it.

As a kid, I later got a CoCo 3 (sometime around 1987 or so) - and I ended up building a null-modem cable to connect both of them, so I could "share" programs from the floppy drive on my CoCo 3 to my CoCo 2. I also experimented around with BBS coding using that setup. It was my first "network", so to speak.