In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

I definitely had cassette based games on the TRS-80, but most of the "wireless" transmission in my youth was via BASIC printed in the back of computer magazines. You had to type in the entire app yourself. I did this for basically every app they listed. Sometimes it was like tax prep software, but I didn't care, even though I was like 9 at the time. Yes, it took a very long time. Yes, you could easily introduce typos and bugs.

A buddy of mine and I realized that if one of us read the code while the other typed, it was much less prone to errors. Once we got it all typed in, we'd switch places when debugging the inevitable typos made. The DATA lines full of nonsensical text (what we now know was hex encoded data) were the go to place for checking for typos.