So there I was, minding my own business, doom-scrolling my way through Facebook posts when I happened upon one that hit me straight in the nostalgia. A photo of a 1980s home computer, a cassette player and some tapes. The text underneath proclaimed "In the 1980s, people could download video
Nearly as unbelievable, the other way to distribute software was to publish in gaming magazines.
Yes, all the code was printed onto the pages of a magazine. And then young nerds bought these magazines and spent days or weeks manually typing in and debugging the hundreds of lines of BASIC to run some game. And then the magazine would be passed onto the next nerd, like comics and pornography.
My own miserable system was a TI 99/4a with a cassette player for data storage. It sounded like a dial-up modem. I typed in a lot of programs and stored them on tapes. Then I started tearing the developed work apart and building my own stuff. It was years before I could call myself a programmer. (I was twelve.) Line-number BASIC sorta ruined me, actually. Learning about object-oriented functions was quite difficult after starting out with GOTO and GOSUB.
Nearly as unbelievable, the other way to distribute software was to publish in gaming magazines.
Yes, all the code was printed onto the pages of a magazine. And then young nerds bought these magazines and spent days or weeks manually typing in and debugging the hundreds of lines of BASIC to run some game. And then the magazine would be passed onto the next nerd, like comics and pornography.
My own miserable system was a TI 99/4a with a cassette player for data storage. It sounded like a dial-up modem. I typed in a lot of programs and stored them on tapes. Then I started tearing the developed work apart and building my own stuff. It was years before I could call myself a programmer. (I was twelve.) Line-number BASIC sorta ruined me, actually. Learning about object-oriented functions was quite difficult after starting out with GOTO and GOSUB.