How people learned to download games using radio

This happened on Monday night in July 1983 in Bristol. While parents watched the next series, advanced teenagers locked themselves in their bedrooms under the pretext of doing homework. In fact, they feverishly prepared their tape recorders, fingers hovered over the keys in an exciting anticipation. When finally a voice on the radio said:" and now what you've all been waiting for...", many were seized with an exciting thrill. Then-press the "record" button, and after a few minutes the room is filled with a strange metal crack…

It was a radio program "Datarama" on "Radio West" and it was the first attempt in the UK to spread a computer program via local radio. The participant of the experiment Joe Tozer remembers how it all began: "at some point I thought that the program is the same recording on the cassette as the sound recording, so why not distribute it as the sound, through the air?"It was a great idea.

Joe was one of the first enthusiasts of home computers, he worked with models "6502 Tangerine", ZX80 and BBC since 1979, and in 1981 he got a job at the Bristol radio station "Radio West". "The station was very interested in finding its niche and getting fans," says Joe,"so we, together with chief engineer Tim Lyons, proposed to organize a weekly program, during which, as a "highlight", we will broadcast recorded computer programs from our collection (at that time as carriers used conventional tape cassettes)." So there was a program "Datarama", but only in July 1983, before the fourth in a row radio, the owners of the radio station finally received from the office of independent broadcasting permission to transfer computer data.

So, what was the first program that Joe and Tim started broadcasting? It was a picture of movie star Cheryl Ladd from Charlie's Angels, taken from the 1975 edition of the Evening Standard. Joe remembers well the moment Cheryl's face flew over the West coast: "it was an exciting night. I wrote the graphic code for the image myself, it was small and so could easily be coded for both the BBC and the ZX81 Micros. We thought it was incredible that the images are transmitted on the radio. Previously, we had already done some sample tests without wide publicity and, to our surprise, found that the transmission in the AM band worked better than in the FM range. On the night of the program's broadcast, it helped us a lot."

Surprisingly, the radio broadcast of the program was no more difficult than the usual speech on the air. "Honestly, it was pretty simple," Joe says. "At that time, the speed of computers running on cassette media was very low, about a few hundred bits per second, so there were no problems." The audience loved it, and pretty soon Joe and Tim began to broadcast all kinds of programs that they themselves wrote, including mini-games and an application that converted keyboard input into Morse code. Initially, they sent programs for BBC Micro and ZX81, but later they expanded the range and began to broadcast programs in "almost all computer languages that existed at the time."

Around the same time, regardless of Tim and Joe, a few miles off the track on Worcester is another man, Simon N. Goodwin also began experiments on the transmission of computer programs through the air. Simon wrote software for games and articles for home magazines, since 1979, in 1983, he wrote for computers "spectrum" game "Gold Mine" entered the top 20 video games. In addition, he was one of the leading "Computer Club" on "Radio Wyvern". In December 1983, he wrote an animated Christmas card on BASIC to send it to radio listeners.

The postcard was sent in two versions: for computers "Sinclair Spectrum" and for "Tandy TRS-80", it came with music and a picture of a jumping deer. How successful was the broadcast? "Some people managed to run the recorded program, but not all of them," says Simon. - Most of the problems were with the version for TRS-80, it turned out the most distortion. (Although its speed is three times lower than that of ZX.) One person managed to read a version for the TRS-80 in the Nascom system, a completely different system that was popular in the UK in the late 1970s, but it took a lot of time and effort to translate machine code." Unlike Joe and Tim, Simon found that, as expected, the higher bandwidth of the FM band provided better transmission quality than in the AM band.

The idea of transferring my Christmas card came up with Simon after he read an article in the magazine "Personal Computer World" on Dutch radio stations, broadcasting the text of the programs in ASCII. It turns out that the Dutch began to transmit computer programs on the radio much earlier than 1983: their radio station "Hobbyscope" sent the code on radio waves back in 1980.

"Hobbyscoop" did broadcast programs during the 1980s, and the creators of the radio show even came up with a way to avoid broadcasting the program multiple times for different versions of home computers. They began to use the BASICODE format, which could be downloaded to any home computer with the BASIC OS, if the user first started the translation program.

The United Kingdom and the Netherlands were not the only countries in which experiments on radio programs were conducted, in fact, this was carried away by the whole of Europe. In Finland, Kai R. Lehton, after learning about the Dutch broadcasts, tried to do something similar on the public radio station YLE, and in 1985 his team was able to transfer the program, which was successfully loaded 600 km from the radio station.

Probably one of the most enthusiastic fans of the new way of distributing computer programs were the inhabitants of Serbia. Zoran Modli, one of the leaders of the Fan 202 program at Radio Belgrade, appealed to the editor of the computer magazine Galaksija with a proposal to organize the distribution of programs for Spectrum through the air. Zoran recalls the first broadcast: "both I and my radio team were very excited. I had to warn the technical specialists of Radio Belgrade, who were on duty at remote radio transmitters, that for the next few minutes they would only hear hissing and growling. Skeptical people were confused and wondered, “What does this crazy do?” But those who listened and understood excitedly contacted us over the phone to say that they had successfully downloaded the program to their computers!»

From 1983 to 1986, Zoran performed about 150 computer programs, most of which were recorded by his devoted and enthusiastic listeners. Among the transferred were programs for mathematical calculations, short educational programs, mini-encyclopedias, simple games and even a flight simulator. The broadcast became so popular that National TV Belgrade even included them in the program "Sunday afternoon", so within two months on the weekends, viewers got the opportunity to torment your ears with the squealing of ones and zeros.

Eventually, floppy disks appeared, and this put an end to the rampant enthusiasm for data transmissions on the radio. With the advent of 16-bit home computers in the late 80s, storing data on audio cassettes is a thing of the past, and only after the widespread use of Wi-Fi in the 21st century, wireless downloading has come to life again. Now, even if we could somehow miraculously use audio cassettes to boot modern computers, the programs have become so huge that recording them with the help of radio would not take a couple of minutes.

As said an employee of the company "Codemasters" Simon N. Goodwin: "If we tried to broadcast the game Race Driver: GRID for PS3, Windows or Xbox-360 format cassettes for TRS-80, it would take about four years and approximately 1957341 audio cassettes (let's round to 2 million, taking into account failures and surprises)". So next time when you feel that the game loads too slow, rejoice that you do not download it using the radio.

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