It was so nice. No pictures at all. Just text of different sizes and block art. And the wait time made you read in order once and not 'doomscrool'.
The limited text length forced the writers to keep it short.
My point being, one way coms are underrated.
Even nowadays I still use it a lot myself for a quick catch up of the news. Some of the benefits: - Since space is limited, the news stories are ultra short and to the point - No ads - No "related stories" - No toxic comment sections - No misleading 'thumbnails'
It doesn't take longer than a minute or two to catch up on the most important stories.
Reminds me of policing the phone line so someone didn't blow up my BBS Kermit downloads.
Hats off to Žiga Turk and Moj Mikro magazine. That one along with Svet Kompjutera and Računari was the main source of IT knowledge for hungry minds in ex Yugoslavia.
And I was planning to spend my retirement days playing with the ZX Spectrum and reading stuff that I immensely enjoyed as a kid. Tough luck :)
You dropped the needle on the record and pressed ‘Run’ simultaneously and it would display an animated set of patterns in sync with the music - and the song lyrics
I'm not sure why he felt he had to write it all in machine code though, sadly he doesn't discuss that decision. Perhaps it was due to the time-dependency of the lyrics?
Programs cannot be copy-protected successfully. KONTRABANT 2 is protected only insofar as not just anyone can look at its databases. Therefore you could copy it to whomever you wish.
Know that by doing so you will be nipping Yugoslavia's young software industry in the bud and hurt us, the enthusiasts who are writing it. You will also be hurting yourself. Programs will become more expensive due to smaller sales or won't come to exist in the first place.
Copying programs is hurting everything ALL of us computer folk have fought for. We've already achieved that anyone can buy a modest computer legally without humiliating themselves at a border crossing while YOU can help us breathe our local soul into these machines.
Don't forget the first law of computer science: "Is it turned on?"
Coincidentally, it's this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FePROXUG6E
https://tunein.com/radio/Radio-Student-893-s25182/
Edit: Found a working link: https://onlineradiobox.com/si/tudent/?cs=si.tudent&played=1
Technical details for those interested: https://sinclair.wiki.zxnet.co.uk/wiki/Spectrum_tape_interfa...
Edit: Found a short sample of a Commodore Datasette program on Wikipedia[0].
There's something bizarrely cool about the idea of taking something designed for an analog medium and using it for something sort of definitionally not analog. It was traditionally cassette tapes, but I saw a YouTube video where some companies distributed games on CDs, and there's something kind of weird and anachronistic about being able to play a ZX Spectrum game off a CD; the program is going from Digital (being written) -> analog (converted to audio signals) -> digital (put on a CD) -> analog (back to audio) -> digital (read by the computer). People can be pretty clever sometimes.
Or, as a better match, a high end VR device able to push 4k games to each eye at 120FPS.
Everyone and his grandma used tapes/cassetes until mid 90's.
Random noise (and data! from a previous block) before that is ignored.
Zooming out, the format is:
Lead-in (~4..5s usually), followed by a short header with program name & type of data that follows.
A short pause.
A shorter lead-in (~2s), followed by the data/program itself.
As far as audio tape storage goes, the ZX Spectrum system was fairly reliable & user-friendly.
That's ignoring headerless blocks, speedloaders, and the many copy-protection schemes...
Assembly: https://worldofspectrum.net/legacy-info/spectrum-rom-load-ro...
TL;DR:
> A '0' bit is encoded as 2 pulses of 855 T-states each.
> A '1' bit is encoded as 2 pulses of 1710 T-states each (ie. twice the length of a '0')
> A 'pulse' here is either a mark or a space, so 2 pulses makes a complete square wave cycle.
Encode to opus:
cat foo.zip | minimodem --tx -r 300 -f out.flac
opusenc --bitrate 64 out.flac out.opus
minimodem --rx -r 300 -f out.opus > foo2.zip[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/345480/Lumo/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHaRTzqB6QC9uzqnwNViw...
It wasn't terribly reliable but it was an interesting experiment by the BBC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestel
It was a great machine for doing early robotics too - there was an Osbourne/Usbourne book on making an arm from balsa wood.
Interestingly there was a cooperation with computer enthusiasts from the Netherlands which led to the adaption of the Dutch BASICODE standard in East Germany.
Also see (apologies for German link, but I guess machine translation will work well):
https://web.archive.org/web/20181107231024/http://r-h-voelz....
The Amstrad CPC 464 had a tape drive integrated into the chassis (the 6128 used a 3" floppy - not 3" 1/4, a 3" disk).
In the UK and Ireland, in the late 80s, the majority of games software in computer shops was for these two platforms (much cheaper than a PC), with a handful floppy disk stuff for PCs. Consoles came in from the toy shop side rather than the computer shop side.
Perhaps it was similar with the Spectrum?
It also makes some sense that users in the East Bloc would have trouble affording expensive hardware.
As a result, there was a wide range of unofficial floppy disk addons, which then brought the issue that there were so many competing products that supporting them all was near impossible and hardly any commercial software bothered.
Post main-popularity, most people settled on the Beta Disc / Beta 128 from Technology Research as being the main unofficial standard, somewhat bolstered by it being adopted in eastern europe and russia, but during the main popularity period, even it had really poor market share in the UK.
* There was also the cartridges for the Interface 2, but that's a different beast entirely and they were even less common than the Interface 1 + microdrive.
** of course there was the Spectrum +3 near the end of the spectrum's life which had a built-in 3" amstrad drive, which saw reasonable commercial support, but it was long after the main portion of the spectrum's popularity, and at a time when the ST and Amiga were beginning to dominate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9
which was better than the MS-DOS I used later on the much more powerful 286 machine that replaced my Coco 3.
Each file weighted less than 30MB, not bad at all. The raw WAV files were around 400MB each.
The files were re-read back with minimodem --rx at the same rate and dumped back to an XZ file, the sha512sum matched the originals.
It was around this time (late 70s), before storage was accessible to computer nerds, that the Kansas City Standard was developed. It provided a cheap and easy way to store "large" amounts of data on standard audio cassettes which were cheap and easy to come by!
It really opened up a lot of things! People no longer needed to retype their programs in to the computer every time they turned it on, it was now easy to share & copy data with friends, and it ALSO gave us the ability to broadcast programs over the radio (like this article is doing!).
The original Kansas City Standard was pretty slow (300 baud), but other standards were developed shortly after (CUTS [Bob Marsh] is one) which provided more speed (1200 baud) and even backward compatibility with KCS.
If anyone is interested in a the dirty details of how KCS all works, I did a series on it (https://youtu.be/6m7vDhscGzU). And am working on covering CUTS in the near future!