Posted by spzb 3/28/2025
And this is not entirely an exercise in pedantry and semantics, since traditional radios were not wired, they weren't the "last transmitter" in a long chain, but were rather often _the_ transmitter. The data for download had to be physically moved _to_ the radio station. (I believe wireless extenders for radio exists, and maybe even some wired for larger coverage, but my understanding is radio still remains exceedingly local, and national stations are largely transmitted via the internet first.)
Though a quick aside; it's funny that you refer to wireless as radio, when in radio's infancy, it was most commonly referred to as "wireless" (e.g. "on the wireless").
I remember see the dot a few times, but it was probably very short lived.
Here's a pretty thorough article on data over radio:
It's one of those ideas that makes a whole lot more sense at the broadcast studio where everyone edits on consoles[0] tied to Betacam decks that have exact, to-the-field seek timecodes and stable freeze frame capability. Even a 4-head VCR would utterly ruin it though.
(German) Wikipedia article: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE
I recorded to tape cassette GDR radio shows on VHF that broadcast code, usually for the GDR "KC 85" 8 bit computer line (U880 processor - Z80 clone).
Funny thing is, you could easily tell from the sounds if the code was assembler or BASIC. The latter was much more orderly and structured.
Problems occurred when someone nearby turned on an electrical device during that transmission, because it was audible and introduced too much of an error and the recording became unusable.
Your Computer certainly had a few of these in the early 1980s.
One example is documented here: https://magazinesfromthepast.fandom.com/wiki/Your_Computer_V... By the way, you have no idea how exciting and space-age that cover looked in 1982.
https://www.discogs.com/release/631562-Papa-Dance-Poni%C5%BC...
It had Atari and Commodore music (as audio) as well as Atari and Commodore software (as data).
Despite the claim on their old page to be the “first use of vinyl for software distribution” they did later acknowledge and reference some prior art in a Slashdot thread: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=140154&threshold=-1&com...
I wish HN would let you search upvoted comments and submissions, it would revolutionize my life since I can remember previous things I've upvoted, but have no easy way to find any of them. I might sit down one day, and manually export all my liked comments and subscriptions.
Edit: There is a (small) wikipedia category for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Vinyl_data
Sometime after they got it, so did their next-door neighbors (not necessarily the same model: they weren't - irony! - on speaking terms), and then sometimes you'd pick up the handset and find yourself eavesdropping on both sides of the neighbor's phone call. Fortunately, the manufacturer had anticipated this: there was a three-position frequency-selection switch on the side. (I can't remember if the base station hopped to whatever you set on the handset, or if you had to set it manually on the base, too.) That worked fine for a while, we used frequency #2, the neighbors used... one of the others, until (I assume - we never heard anyone else's calls) a further-away neighbor or two also got a cordless phone, and the next-door folks had to frequency hop.
They put up with that for a while, and then sadly reverted to corded phones until more-advanced cordless tech became available.
In this case, continuous GPS coordinates are sent on one audio channel while the other channel is voice.
