Yes, in the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

Summary

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 games from radio broadcasts by recording the audio onto cassette tapes. These tapes could then be played on computers to load the games". I nodded sagely to myself as I remembered doing just that.Then I started to read the comments underneath and people were flat-out denying that this had ever happened. The reply guys broadly fell into two camps: the "I have never heard of this, therefore it never happened" and the over confident "expert" saying things like "this would be technically impossible due to some fancy sounding words I've heard like 'hertz', 'compression' and 'frequency shift keying', therefore it never happened".Just to make sure I was in a spluttering rage the page itself was titled "Unbelievable facts" as if my own childhood had become unbelievable. Although now I think about it it was an unbelievably long time ago, so maybe they have a point.My youth is now an unbelievable fact, apparentlyAnyway, come back with me to the UK in the early 1980s. Recession, strikes, unemployment and the first female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, dominated the news. The home video cassette recorder was only just becoming common, the compact disc wouldn't be launched until the middle of the decade and mobile phone networks didn't even exist. Dexy's Midnight Runners, Irene Cara and Culture Club soundtracked the era and, across the land, the home computer boom was booming.Computers were new, barely making their way even into the workplace. Most people in office jobs were using typewriters, carbon papers and the postal system. But the microprocessor revolution promised to make computer skills essential to the economy and so the British Broadcasting Corporation began a public education ...