[icosian]

I donated my BBC Model B+ to a computer museum recently, along with a stack of Acorn User magazines (available on the Internet Archive, BTW) and software on cassette. Felt strong pangs of regret driving away. I can still feel the excitement of figuring it all out, a world opening up to me.

Those BBC TV shows had the unusual feature of broadcasting software over the end credits. Just had to tape the screeching and play it back into the computer.

[darreninthenet]

One of the shows also did an experiment of downloading software from the screen itself - you sent off for a little box which I think (it's been a while!) plugged into the Beeb's serial port, fired up a bit of software and just before the end of the show they'd put a little square graphic overlay over the broadcast in the bottom left hand corner.

That was your queue to literally physically stick the box over that square on the screen and then a few minutes later during the end credits that square would turn into what would look like to the human eye just plain old static but to the sensor in the box stuck over it, it was reading it as a datastream that the software would interpret and save.

To be honestly it wasn't terribly reliable, I think we got it to work maybe once or twice in the few times they did it but was an interesting experiment by the BBC back in the 80s!

[zozbot234]

The Internet Archive should have the cassette software as well, although some of it might be hidden from view due to copyright concerns.

[ochrist]

There's this: https://archive.org/details/BASICODE2Manual

I actually tried downloading programes from the Dutch radio station back in those days - and it worked.

[vram22]

>Those BBC TV shows had the unusual feature of broadcasting software over the end credits. Just had to tape the screeching and play it back into the computer.

Can you explain this? Do you mean that BASIC programs were encoded as sound in some way, and then could be uploaded into the computer and run?

[cracoucax]

Never used a BBC but 8bit computers of this era often used cassettes to load and save data.

The tape would contain bleeps and blurps which would be decoded into bytes by the computer. EG this is the sound produced by an Amstrad cpc464 loading a game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvChkOHgDIo

This meant that to copy software you didn't even need a computer, just a double cassette deck.

And that by recording the credits of this BBC show to tape and playing that back into the computer you'd load some program. That's actually a brilliant idea, I wonder what kind of software they broadcasted.

[vram22]

Yes, brilliant.

Sounds (pun not intended but noticed) like steganography.

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

[vram22]

Got it, thanks.

[firecall]

Not just basic programmes, anything digital can be encoded in this way.

Software has even been distributed on vinyl records and flexi singles!

You could connect a domestic cassette recorder up to a BBC Micro and use to save and load software onto normal cassettes!

There were favoured devices that would give better results and better cassettes for data storage and so on.

Its all ancient history and folklore now :-)

[vram22]

Thanks.

[justinlloyd]

Yes. That's exactly it. Just like an acoustic modem. And also how software and data was stored on compact audio cassette when disk drives (the floppy kind, not the hard kind) were too expensive or out of reach of the average person.

[vram22]

Makes sense. Thanks.