Denial

remember we had to re-do it about five times, because everytime we were half way through, an irritated mother would yell from upstairs "What is that horrendous noise!". This would of course be recorded onto the tape, and so we would have to sigh and start over.

Why is there so much yelling up and down stairs and in between rooms in Canada? Does it happen in other countries as well? I can understand that slightly less refined people will yell from one end of the house to the other, but even when I visited a very polite and proper family who was otherwise very soft spoken, the phone might ring, the caller was looking to talk to someone upstairs and then the mom would not go half way up the stairs to tell the person that someone was calling, but would just stand right next to the phone and scream the persons name!



Is that considered polite?

Anyway, that was just an aside. Once your mom wrecked the recording and you had to start over, did she yell again once the horrendous noise had to start over again? Besides, did she understand when you explained just what the noise was?

If someone asked "what is that noise?" in a hostile manner, I would reply (provided that it was not my own mother, of course) "Don't ask questions if you won't understand the answer!"

I don't know about TV, but radio stations used to broadcast some home computer software in the early 1980's. Maybe you have heard of Basicode, which was a unified Basic dialect available for many computers. I even think they managed to unify the tape signals so a program saved on a VIC or Spectrum could be loaded on an Atari, MSX or whatever. The unified Basic however limited programs to rather simple PRINT affairs.

Other radio stations broadcasted separate programs for each machine. Swedish radio did for a while, and I'm sure many other experimented too. It didn't go on very long though.

If you want to copy a tape, music, speech or computer data, I recommend a double tape deck specially made for this. You may have luck with DIN connectors or separate mic/ear too, but it is more fiddly. I remember those "hard copies" had perhaps 70% success rate.

Carlsson,

A radio broadcast of more elaborate programs could have been made for many types of computers if they had thought ahead. First, they could broadcast those parts of code that were common to all 8 bit BASIC interpreters. And then a message could follow "VIC 20 users, please record the following sound bit" and then that sound bit could contain the lines or changes particular to the VIC 20. And then it could go on "Atari users, please record the following..." and so on. I don't know if that strategy was every used, but it might have been a good idea.

Once in Basicode mode, I'm unsure if it would let you load native code.

It reminds me about all those readers who wrote to the COMPUTE! magazine and asked them which software they used to translate Basic listings between different computers, and where to buy it. In reality, each listing was ported by hand by one of the editors, and quite often the program itself was enhanced or modified so each version differed slightly in presentation and gameplay. I suppose they had some kind of software to roughly translate a listing though, but leave the fine points to be fixed by hand. Most Basic dialects adhere to the ANSI standard anyway.

I suppose you are right, I didn't think of that. It would probably be necessary to broadcast an entire program one at a time for each computer.

I wonder if broadcasted programs would be at all be a practical means of distributing software today? I suppose packet radio and RTTY are somewhat along these lines.

I think today you would use a digital receiver connected to your computer, so you can receive signals much like how aerial digital TV is distributed. I don't know if one can speak about a maximum transfer rate through air, but a digital TV signal seems to average at 5 Mbps?

If that speed can be used for data transfers too, it means about about 600 kB per second under ideal conditions. It is not blindingly fast compared to high speed Ethernet, but quite satisfactory.

Wait.. did I just describe wireless networking, data transfer through 3G and so on?

does anyone have a link or a pic of those LP's people used to put programs on?

carlsson wrote:Once in Basicode mode, I'm unsure if it would let you load native code.

Commodore computers don't have a Basicode mode....do they? I had never heard of it.

I can see there is a subset within BASIC that is shared among all the BASIC dialects, though (PRINT, INPUT, etc. etc.)

No, ral-clan. You would need to load a Basic parser (from tape or disk) to load/run software written in the unified Basic dialect. Perhaps an unexpanded VIC-20 would not be up to the task, if you should have room for the actual program as well.

Now is there any truth that using computers makes you dumb, or to be more precise, makes you lose your mathematical aptitude? There was talk when I was young about not allowing pupils with math problems to use computers in school because they will never learn since the machine will do everything for them.

The talk even went so far as to say "in order to use computers, you have to have really good handwriting"

So, computers make you dumb? I don't know if anyone still can believe that one.

I think with the right educational software, the computer will help students who have learning problems. As per your question about handwriting, I read earlier this year about some schools who experiment with letting their first year school kids (age 6-7) start typing on the computer right away. The motivation is that the pupils will more quickly learn the alphabet: how each letter looks like, perhaps even spelling. Once they have learned the letters, they can imitate them by writing on paper, which not only is faster than the old way around, but results in nicer handwriting. Or at least that the kids can write letters in a typewriter style. Why not really, there are "handwriting" fonts that the students can learn to imitate just as well as they learn handwriting from the board.