In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

This is great and I believe it. But saying your game would be loaded "after a few minutes" might be true for a small game. I had the Commodore 1541 floppy drive while my friend had the Commodore Datasette. The speed difference between these were huge. The floppy drive was around 300 bytes per second while the tape drive was around 50 bytes per second (3KB/minute). We would literally go outside to play while waiting on the tape drive.

The beeb could do 1200 baud. I'm pretty sure you could load any game in 5 minutes. A 7 minute tape could hold 64KB.

Wikipedia says the Spectrum could do even better.

That's why you needed it saved with Turbo. it was at least 10 times faster.. I used to have this cartridge... besides turbo it had some more things, it could grab a hardcopy of memory (ie if you were playing a game.. you could save it... and then load it later, it would be in the same state)

https://www.ami64.com/product-page/kcs-power-cartridge-c64

See also https://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/2016/11/what-was-first-co...

That's what you get for using an inferior machine. Spectrum users had no such problem.

300 Bps is demon speed! I remember using an acoustic coupler to access the early internet at 300 BAUD (i.e. 300 bps), or about 30 char/sec.

Later on, I also remember downloading Linux kernel tarballs, hot off the press, via FTP using 9600 bps modem (if I recall correctly - slow as crap), which I'd kick off before going to bed and hope for the best in the morning. Sometimes I'd make a script to download a few different files at once.

On the theme of slow computing in general, I remember doing embedded software builds on a PDP 11 (Xenix) that would take an hour or so to complete - so you'd go and practice your juggling or somesuch waiting for it to complete.

Still, the big thrill in mid-late 70's had been the switch from batch punched card deck submissions to a mainframe (an hour later comeback to collect the syntax error, or core dump printout) to being ONLINE (woo hoo!) - sitting in front of a terminal and actually interacting with a computer in real time!