Today, hard drives are practically a given. Solid-state drives are replacing them, and both floppy disks and optical discs fall into the category of obsolete technology. But there was a time when all we had at our disposal was an audio cassette. If you wanted to share a piece of software, you needed a copy of the tape or the original code. However, an old British radio show called Datarama rewrote several rules by transmitting the content of a program using a live signal, while the audience waited with a recorder on the other side…
In my long adventure with the Commodore 64, I never managed to get my hands on the 1541 drive. Watching load times under the “floppy disk format” was something wonderful… and impossible for me to buy. Logically, the most effective solution depended on a clone of the Datasette 1530, and occasionally looking for a new cassette to record data on it. Slow but cheap, and much more durable compared to some low-cost, questionable-quality diskettes that appeared later.
Datarama: Video Games over the Radio
I remember that when copying games, the advice was to bring my own datasette. “Head alignment and such,” the pirate of the moment would say. But in the late '70s and early '80s, home computer enthusiasts were even more creative, and used a very abundant resource to share games and programs: Radio.
History tells us that on a lost Monday night in July 1983, a show on the signal Radio West of the city of Bristol called Datarama gave rise to the first transmission in the United Kingdom of a computer program using local radio. Its host Joe Tozer and chief engineer Tim Lyons proposed a weekly program dedicated to computing, with the particularity of transmitting programs and games live.
(Here is Datarama's theme music)
The technology didn't prevent it: In fact, if you take a cassette with computer data and play it on an audio system, the signal you hear is the same one the system interprets. With a speed of a few hundred bits per second, the radio signal fit perfectly. What was the first “program”? A “photo” of the stunning Cheryl Ladd, in all the glory that 40 x 80 resolution could offer.
At first, the transmissions were compatible with very British computers like the BBC Micro and the ZX81, but they didn't take long to expand to include software from Commodore and other platforms. For logical reasons of bandwidth and signal clarity, users were more successful recording the signals via FM.
The best part is that Datarama was not the only one transmitting games over the radio. A program called Hobbyscoop in the Netherlands had been sharing code with its listeners since 1980, and also incorporated a fabulous solution to avoid multiple transmissions of the same software intended for different computers: BASICODE, a way to make code compatible across different BASIC interpreters.
The craze of software via radio swept the European continent. In Serbia, a transmission called Ventilator 202 led by Zoran Modli shared hundreds of programs between 1983 and 1986, from calculators and encyclopedias to flight simulators. That code was compatible with Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and of course, the DIY Galaksija computer we talked about a while ago. To the general public and Radio Belgrade technicians, Zoran had lost his mind with his strange noises and squeaks, but home computer owners understood immediately.
As expected, the end of software transmitted by radio came with the advance of floppy disks and 16-bit computers. Speed and capacity, added to a falling price, sealed the fate of the cassette as a storage medium. Users wanted to read more data faster, and recording a radio signal for hours stopped making sense.
Source: Kchung Radio
