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In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

(newslttrs.com)
286 points spzb | 1 comments | 28 Mar 25 22:14 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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bpoyner ◴[31 Mar 25 11:33 UTC] No.43533739[source]▶
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.
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1. forinti ◴[31 Mar 25 12:00 UTC] No.43533946[source]▶
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.