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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: 0.28s | source
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coreyh14444 ◴[31 Mar 25 10:49 UTC] No.43533429[source]▶
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.
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1. nocman ◴[31 Mar 25 19:19 UTC] No.43538702[source]▶
The ones I did this from were "Compute!" and "Compute's Gazette! (for Commodore 64 and VIC-20)". They were all octal numbers, if I remember correctly, and the last number in each row was a checksum. I also paid my sister to type in some of them in for me. A lot of them were games, but there were also some very useful programs in there. I spent so many late nights typing away on that 8-bit machine. It was a cool time to be a kid who was interested in computers.