this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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The Sinclair ZX-81 was my first PC and I didn't have a hard drive so I stored my programs on cassette tapes. I also bought games and loaded them from cassette tapes. You needed a cassette player with a seconds counter and a reset button.
You had to write down where the program was saved from the starting second to the final second. To load a program, I would forward the tape to the starting second, set the ZX to loading mode, and then play the tape until the ending second and hope the ZX reads the file properly. If not, you'd have to restart the process.
Never tried recording a transmission cause there was no thing close to me that was transmitting but you copy tape to tape with the right equipment. To record a transmission, the fidelity of the audio would definitely be the biggest issue.
...or you could have been a rich kid like me and used a single cassette per program. (I didn't have a cassette player that could count seconds. We used these small dictation cassettes. Made handling them a little easier. Also for some reason these small cassetes were everywhere and easier to come by.) I even had a friend group where I was the typist to copy code from the latest zines because I would make the least amount of errors when transferring from paper to tape. Good times. You hit me right in my nostalgia with your comment.
Look at your rich ass with all those cassettes!
To be frank, we were already pretty good just having the damn Sinclair!