Retro Tech Nibble: Pete Shelley | Software on Vinyl Records Pt.1/2 | ft. Techmoan
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Series Videos
● Part 1 | Software on Vinyl | • Retro Tech Nibble: Pet...
● Part 2 | Full Demo of Pete Shelley XL1 |
• Retro Tech Nibble: Pe...
● Guests
Techmoan - / techmoan
● Description
Software on Vinyl, it was a thing! Not to mention on other audio formats. Today we take a look at an example with special guest Matt from TechMoan to help us.
● Music
Was that away message for me? - 8 Bit Betty
Part 2 of this video is here:
th-cam.com/video/aX1Lc6nqHxU/w-d-xo.html
Thank you for watching! Special thanks to Mat over at th-cam.com/users/techmoan for taking part. Do you have more examples of data on vinyl or other novel methods of distribution? Leave a comment I'd love to hear about them. Neil - RMC
RetroManCave the avant garde band The Residents actually have a "song" where they use a spectrum loading as the percussion track for the song with weird sounds and vocals over the top. There's a group trying to erase the vocals so they can get the Residents program to work. It's on the vinyl version of the extended Freak Show soundtrack.
Also you mention the Thompson Twins and Shaking Steven's but you didn't mention Frankie Goes To Hollywood? Their game was hugely successful, ranked among the all time greatest C64 games.
That doesn't sound enjoyable but I'm going to have a listen to it now! I remember the Frankie Goes to Hollywood game but I didn't know it was released on vinyl, I lost quite a few hours to that one.
RetroManCave yeah Residents stuff is a bit out there. It's an obscure track (you want the "Residents presents freak show: the special edition" on vinyl, it's the very last track entitled "He didn't like my mummy: man/machine conversation I" ). If you can't find it, I'll upload my copy at the weekend. It's an obscure one even by residents standards. They're an interesting hand tech wise - freak show itself was a CD-Rom for Macintosh making use of graphics and sound to tell a story and they've used everything from Laserdisc to podcasts as artists. They've always been on the cutting edge of technology, despite being fairly unknown.
Yeah, it came on a 7" vinyl with all the logos from the game on it. It was a special edition for somewhere like Germany. I only know it had a vinyl issue because there was a copy of it in a glass case at Liverpool's post-punk/New wave art exhibition a few years ago.
Seem to remember a tape released for cassette store day a few years ago that had a Commodore 64 game. Might’ve been by Ash if I remember correctly
Me watching the video: "Please be Mat...Please be Mat...YES!"
I love how Techmoan goes into so much detail about recording a tape. Fascinating.
Love how Techmoan is in this one.
I'm only 1/3rd into the video, but this reminded me of something. In the later 1980's, there was a group called, "Information Society" I think. If I remember correctly. They released a CD and it had a hidden extra track. After the last song played, there was a looooong silence and then you heard a 300 baud modem answer tone and data. If you called a second line that had a 300 baud modem connected to it and played the track into the phone, the modem would act like it was connected and a story would start coming through.
It was an accounting of a little adventure the band had one night after one of their shows.
It was probably the coolest thing I'd ever seen a modern band do. Until this video that is.
Was this the one about the Bermuda Triangle? If not I've read about a similar one that you can hook up and receive a message to read in the same way and it sounds really cool I'd love to try that out
I loved InSoc. Here's more info on the data track: spacemutiny.com/whiteroses/
As a side-note, they were also one of the very few groups that put out CD+G discs.
Thanks for sparing me having to bring this up.
Techmoan: That Eames Lounge Chair, such envy!
informationsociety.us
Kevin Loughin you're talking about Don't Be Afraid released in 1997. At this point, Kurt was a software designer in the bay area at the time.
Just to demystify Spectrum’s loading method and the best ways to record and play back data. I personally coded tape loaders for the Spectrum, including a rather speedy 3x version. I’m thus very intimately familiar with the entire process.
First, the standard (ROM) Spectrum loader expects data at a rate of approximately 1500 baud. I say approximately, because the way data is encoded is a series of pulses. Shorter pulses are zeros, and longer pulses are ones. Depending on the distribution of ones and zeros, the actual data rate will vary somewhat.
That said, the actual frequency of the shortest pulse (a zero) is low enough-somewhere under 2.5-3 KHz. So any poor quality tape recorder can almost always guarantee reliable loading. The lower frequencies are indeed irrelevant. However, you don’t want to oversaturate your recording either (i.e. set the levels too high), because any distortion will introduce numerous harmonics, which might lead to loading errors. Incidentally, this is why the Spectrum manual recommends setting the volume level to ¾ of a maximum. This is a ballpark value; it’s there just so you don’t crank it up “to eleven.”
Unless the two audio channels-left and right-are terribly out of phase, you don’t need to worry about recording in stereo. No harm will be done (besides, you can always use just one channel for loading).
The decoding method is such that most wow and flutter will have no effect on the reliability of data loading. The loader synchronizes to _each bit_ individually, so even pretty significant speed variations are okay.
With a good quality digital audio source, you can easily play back WAVs sampled at 11 kHz or less. This doesn’t translate easily to cheap analog tape recorders, however, because of their varying high-frequency rolloff.
Type II (chromium dioxide) tape is not really necessary, as most of the time, the limitation will be in the playback equipment. A good quality Type I tape recorded on decent equipment is all you need.
The Spectrum’s loading scheme was one of the most robust among the 8-bit computers of the era, and with a little bit of knowledge of how it worked, you could reliably load any tape (provided it was a quality recording to begin with).
Cheers.
is there any reason the instructions on the vinyl didn't just say to.. plug your spectrum into the vinyl player's output? since you can play a digital file off of a phone, is transferring to a tape really necessary, or was it just there because it might not always be easy to get an audio jack out of the hifi, but most people had the means to make a tape from a record?
(i think the stereo vs mono thing was mostly about avoiding the stereo heads being misaligned from the tape in a cheap unit rather than any phase shift - after all, both pieces of equipment he ended up using used stereo heads in the end - and a mono head reading stereo tracks does (i think?) just downmix them anyway?)
Yeah, it sounds pretty solid. I was stuck with an atari 800XL as my only 8 bit system, though it was the early 90's....
The tape interface on the atari is well documented, but an absolute pain, and the system requiring you to press start or option to disable basic and/or the internal OS didn't help because if you failed to do it, tape loading would just silently break even though there's nothing otherwise wrong.
The tape drive uses a dedicated proprietary interface, and it does have the slight benefit that since you have a dedicated tape player, the Atari itself can stop and start the tape.
It also has a very weird, and very rarely used ability to play dual track tapes which have a regular audio recording on one track, and the data on the other - the machine will play back the audio as the tape loads. Very weird.
Main problem though is the tape loading speed is about 650 baud, and is restricted to being between 500 and 850 baud no matter what. This is possibly one of the slowest tape systems of any 80's micro, and there's nothing you can do about it. In spite of this the actual serial bus it connects to, and the atari's circuitry can handle serial data transfers approaching 70 kilobytes a second. (indeed most floppy emulators will set themselves up to transfer at 56700 bytes a second, which is triple the speed of an official floppy drive, and vastly faster than the tape drive.)
One feature the atari has which could be exploited in theory, (but may cause problems if you tried it), is that the data is stored as two frequencies. One indicates zero, the other indicates a one, (length of a bit is irrelevant to what it encodes, only the frequency).
While there are official standard/default tape frequencies, these are software configurable.
This would in principle mean you could perform data multiplexing on a tape by recording multiple sets of frequencies, thus increasing the effective capacity of the tape. Of course, this is likely to be highly error prone...
(hmmh. It just occurred to me that a way around the Atari's loading problem would be a tape drive that decodes the audio stream directly from the tape by itself, then transfers the decoded data over the digital lines, the same way as a floppy drive would - the serial port has dedicated audio lines for the tape drive, in spite of the proprietary drives it used, the interface was still basically an audio interface. - it also would seem to follow that with an adapter it would've been possible to use standard audio tape drives instead of dedicated atari ones.)
Storing data on tape has some weird features, and it's interesting, but can be painfully slow.
Certainly a feature of those old computers I don't miss. XD
Well, you can’t directly plug the phono output from the turntable into the Spectrum, because the output voltage from the cartridge is tiny. Turntables require a specialized preamp (which also applies an EQ correction). However, you could hook up the headphone output of an amp to the Spectrum and load data from vinyl records directly.
I think the transfer-to-tape-first recommendation was mostly to prevent wear-and-tear of that area of the record, as it’s degradation will have more effect on the reliability of data loading (especially pops and clicks).
Regarding head misalignment, there might be some truth to that, although a small screwdriver for adjusting the head’s azimuth was always a part of the tape loading process for me back in the day. Granted, it was mostly needed for, ahem, “complication” tapes I acquired from friends. Most commercial tapes used professional duplicator equipment, and even the cheapest consumer tape players went through some adjustment process using specialized head adjustment test tapes.
The standard (ROM) tape loader on the C64 was around 300 baud. Now that _is_ slow. Of course, custom loaders sped things up dramatically, but the loaders themselves had to be loaded first at this appalling speed. So, the Atari wasn’t that bad in comparison.
The Spectrum’s standard tape interface can actually achieve rates of up to ~17-19 kbit/s (look up OTLA loader), but that would definitely require a super high-end tape deck and a Type IV tape. OTLA was designed to work with modern digital sources with the sampling frequency of 48 kHz. Typical game load time is about fifteen seconds.
The key speed limitation was the (somewhat arbitrary) lowest common denominator of a “typical” cheap tape player. I don’t know of any commercial loader for the Spectrum that went above 2.5x the standard loading speed, aside from a couple of official game releases that came out on a CD such as the Codemasters CD Games Pack.
>besides, you can always use just one channel for loading
Since the original supplied cable was mono this would have been the default.
software on a record, sent through the mail, recorded onto a cassette tape, uploaded to youtube and then played back through a modern computer into a zx spectrum
lets go
MatA57 I love it, can't stop giggling! How about an ironic full circle another way--8-track to 8-bit...?
Ah, my two favourite British gadget channels in one. A Sunday afternoon treat
I liked the mail slot gag.
Today there probably are mailmen (or are they "mail-person"now?) around who would hammer an LP through the mail slot....
J K No. As a postman, we're hugely careful with records. So you're wrong. Stop it, grandad.
Love this! One of my favourite artists (if you haven’t heard of Pete Shelley you’ll have definitely heard of the awesome Buzzcocks, of which he was the lead singer) one of my favourite systems AND my favourite crossover of TH-cam creators! Thank you!
Mind blown. How did I grow up in the 80s and not know about the spectrum and games on vinyl? Thank you for bringing such interesting technologies to the retro community!
RMC + Techmoan + Speccy. Best episode ever !
Thank you sir!
A Hungaraian new wave group called KFT (Hungarian short for Ltd.) had a BASIC program listing for the Speccy on the cover of their 1984 album Bál az operában (Ball in the opera house). It was a labyrinth game called Rózsák Valériának (Roses for Valerie), which coincided with a song name on the album.
AttilaSVK Very interesting! Was the actual listing available to be loaded into a real Spectrum?
Bsith no, you had to type in the program, but maybe it's available somewhere on the net, I never checked it.
AttilaSVK Do copies of this records still float around?
Yes, and you can find them for cheap even on Discogs. Search for SLPM 17871, which is the catalog number of the LP. Also if you search for "Rózsák Valériának ZX Spectrum Gameplay" here on TH-cam, you can find a video with the gameplay.
My sister had that shakin stevens tape with the game on it. Digging up the old memories on this video for sure.
Superbunnyhop mentioned that vinyl software distribution was somewhar popular in East Germany, because import bans made tape and tape equipment very hard to obtain.
failing@commenting exactly. They have a little section at the Computerspiele Museum in Berlin dedicated to computers in the east block, and they had some records with programs on at the exhibition.
you've heard of 'music on bones', now get ready for: 'games on bones'
Sick dance moves.
Bret Sutherland Time Masheen
I did this when this was released and it worked. Old nerds did it first :). Looking back there was a real advantage to already being an adult in the late 70's with a job in a tech industry (TV as a sound engineer) and a good disposable income. I obsessively bought every home micro that took my fancy. Happy days with the ZX81, Spectrum, BBC B, CPC464, CPC 6128, BBC Master, C64, ST, Amiga. A tip for cassette use with stereo systems and the danger of phase error, just disable one half of the stereo or don't combine both tracks into the computer's mono input.
Being a kid had its disadvantages - I remember thumbing through the big thick mail-order catalogues of the era and deaming of having an 8-bit machine!!! lol.
I grew up with Windows Xp as a kid and tried to do something with the computers in school trying to figure out how they work, but everything but the user programs we were supposed to use was locked down and I couldn't really learn anything about what the computer actually was doing. :-(
Sometimes I envy those that got introduced into computing in the era where you had to read a manual to operate the computer and learned how it works in the process.
Techmoan never fails to impress me, his knowledge is unbelievable.. great video..
Liked for the epic dance moves.
WOW!
That Pete Shelley music video and lyrics in a BASIC Spectrum programme is probably the coolest thing I have ever seen.
You really should do an in person video with Matt from Techmoan, it'd be great.
OMG, what a blast from the past, I had the Thompson Twins record that was on the magazine cover too! I was so excited that there was a fusion/merging of music to my Speccy, my excitement was dashed when I tried possibly up to a dozen times to get it to work, copying over to mono cassette, stereo, direct from record player... but all to no avail because my copy of the record had a crease on it (thanks magazine shop for that!)... tossed up whether to go buy another copy, which I did... and got it working finally. What a little trainspotter was I back in the day! Cheers RetroManCave & Techmoan for dredging up a momentous (and slightly traumatising) time from my childhood, much appreciated!
Great work / collab. I love the fact our favourite youtubers are all pals and send each other stuff to help out with their videos.
Reminds me of the Codemasters CD which required a HiFi and tape to run.
Tape was loaded into C64, and it presented a menu. Choose one of the ?30? games and it would ask you to select the track on the CD. The CD player was connected to the C64 (can't remember how as I was 7 at the time) and it loaded the game.
Games were stored as audio tracks on the CD, opposed to how CD ROMs stored data.
That's incredibly cool, I would have loved to see multi load CD ROM games for the C64 back in the day!
I remember the Codemasters CD games pack, never bought it - trailblazing really for circa 1990!!
CD-ROM drives for the PC hadn't really taken off yet, and were astronomically priced £400-500 with the sound or interface card.
The most recent software on vinyl as I type this is Soundhog's Astrablast/Newtown Parkway which was released in May 2018. It's hidden and there's no mention of it in the sleeve notes (although the cover design is a slight hint!) It's only on the vinyl version too.
Lovely collaboration, thanks for that chaps! As it happens, I stumbled upon the excellent Techmoan channel last weekend and binged watch several videos. Wonderfully informative and very well produced. Fittingly, one of the videos I watched was about video stored on vinyl records.
Huh, never knew there were other high quality channels like Techmoan but I'm glad I found this video, now I can subscribe
I'ts the other way round for me... glad to be a caveman now :p
J K haha, different methods same results at least
Other way round for me too. I've subscribed to Techmoan for years and only just found this channel.
Sub for techmoan for years and youtube suggested this video to me
I would like to recommend these additional channels:
databits, Technology Connections, VWestlife
which cover much of the same territory, but with an American slant.
EDIT: I forgot about The 8-bit Guy when i wrote my comment.
I hit the thumbs up as soon as I saw your amazing robot dance. Priceless!
It puzzles me that people think the sound of data are so awful , when they seem to enjoy listening to stuff like boy bands, Britney Spears, country, and german schlager.
Haha savage
brilliant! Two of my favourite channels have collided. Retro Techmoan / Retro Moan Cave
Really enjoyed this episode as i had a few spectrums in my past and have been subbed to techmoan for ages,a brilliant and very informative channel.Cheers Retrocaveman..p.s That name always reminds me of the cartoon captain caveman.
Wow I'm so glad I found this channel, I've been dying for more retro tech content and your voice is so calming.
Great video and collaboration with another TH-cam channel of mine, Techmoan.
Look forward to seeing more videos from you soon
Love both channels . Thank you so much for your videos ..absolutely fascinating stuff
The German minimal electro / bitpop band _Welle: Erdball_ relesed several programs for Commodore 64, including programs to let their songs play by a C64. On the data track on their maxi CD _VW-Käfer_ (released in 2001) among some programs were also instructions to build an RS232 to floppy drive cable to transfer the included floppy disk images to a Commodore 1541 drive. Their album _Horizonterweiterungen_ (released in 2004) was only available on vinyl and contained a track for C64 datassette.
I remember back in the 80's was a computer magazine that distributed software on flexible "vinyl" discs. They were floppy, but also a record. I think they held bytecode just as most of the radio broadcasted software was.
The Thompson Twins adventure game is an example of this, distributed on C&VG magazine, there's a short clip of it in the video
Had that one, never could get it to work.
I remember when “Rainbow” magazine, dedicated to the TRS-80 Color Computer, included a vinyl flexi-disc with software for their anniversary issue in July 1983. Unfortunately I don’t remember what was on it. There’s an internet archive of the magazine issue that makes mention of the disc, but doesn’t say what was on it... archive.org/stream/rainbowmagazine-1983-07/The_Rainbow_Magazine_07_1983#page/n13/mode/2up
@@rananite "makes mention of the disc, but doesn’t say what was on it... ". Hi Richard, go to page 146 and it tells you what is on the disk - 3 programs: Shuffle, Memory, Home Budget Analysis. See: archive.org/details/rainbowmagazine-1983-07/page/n143/mode/2up
Real men don't record on tape and load the program. They just listen to the code track on vinyl and run the Z80 code directly in their brain.
Real programmers enter programs using 0's and 1's
Can't you hum it back from memory in a microphone plugged to the computer for it to load? I'd love to sing a program to a computer one day!
Woo Techmoan! Awesome collab!
I love how you guys from different channels work together :D
This is awesome :D Excellent coop! Always worth watching.
I have never heard of that. Thank you for showing me this great senseless piece of history! And of course, it was great to see the copying to a tape. :) Nice pieces of machinery.
Always like to see another great TH-cam collaboration, Techmoan was definitely the right choice when it comes to audio 😊
Today I learned:
-Techmoan is everywhere
-The ZX likes STICC, not THICC
-Music albums have included software on them since forever
Two of my favourite channels in one video!
Awesome! Thanks Neil
Quality stuff. That is a subject i was wondering about, and I am glad you covered it.
Always a joy to discover a great new channel to subscribe to....then even better when the first video I watch has Techmoan in it :D
Thank you!
People are still doing this today (myself included), but this time the audio files are on another more modern PC or a mobile phone. I load software on my Apple IIe through the cassette port attached to an old Samsung Note 4 I have, and while doing so, I chuckle that an Apple device is getting fed data from an Android device! ;)
I bet Steve Jobs would rotate in his grave if he could somehow know this. HAHA :D
LOL
My 2 favorite British tech nerds together in one satisfying video, today is going to b a good day!
Techmoan's silver and wood cassette deck is a thing of immense beauty. WANT!!!
The album 'The Bermuda Triangle' by Isao Tomita from Japan (RCA Records 1979) also has some computer code that you can load into something called the TARBEL system. The music fades out to the single tone you hear on a tape before the data, then you hear the data, then the tone again which fades back into the music and the track carries on. There's one on each side of the record. It's a really short burst of data, only a couple of seconds, so it probably just prints a few words on the screen or something.
I love it when my favorite tech TH-camrs collab.
Never knew about this, but I'm now fascinated beyond belief!
You have unearthed a pandora-like music box that will activate Skynet!
Always very smartly dressed, that techmoan guy!
That Pioneer SD-1000 is one of the most ostentatious audio-specific devices I've seen. A friggin' analog oscilloscope integrated into a hifi footprint. Very cool.
I love how Techmoan is just sort of the resident AV expert for all of the computer geek folks I follow on TH-cam.
First software on vinyl I could find was Elektor magazine October 1978 archive.org/stream/ElektorMagazine/Elektor%5Bnonlinear.ir%5D%201978-10#page/n11 Pete Shelley replaced Howard Devoto as lead singer of The Buzzcocks. His most famous song as singer is arguably 'Ever Fallen In Love?', which was later covered by 'The Fine Young Cannibals
Interesting, informative and well produced. Great work.
If you're not familiar with Pete Shelley you should. One of the best new wave artists of the early 80's.
The XL1 album is a really enjoyable listen
Check out his previous album, "Homosapien" where he poses with a Commodore PET on the cover. Similar style.
is it the same Pete Shelley who was in the buzzcocks?
Yes, the very same Pete Shelley!
Pete Shelley was into electronic music even pre-Buzzcocks, as he recorded in 1974 a whole album using a homebuilt oscillator. It only got released in 1980 tho.
BTW Chris Sievey's Camouflage came out in 1983, not 81.
Great video as always love to see two of my favourite you tube channels collaborate 👍
Pete Shelley was the lead singer/songwriter of the U.K. pop/punk band Buzzcocks, who had quite a successful career in the late 1970s. He is probably best known for writing "Ever fallen in love with someone (you shouldn't have fallen in love with)" which became a hit for The Fine Young Cannibals in the mid '80s.
You can still dance to it... just do The Robot
Awesome video. Never knew the ZX Spectrum was used in this way. Very clever. :)
Man I LOVED the cassette loading "screechy," noises and, that is why I particularly chose Speculator for the ZX Spectrum emulator as you can load in .tap files to re-hear those beautiful sounds once more.
Cool! I've always wondered if software could be loaded from vinyl and if it was ever done commercially. Thanks for bringing this to light!
Back in the day when they aired games late at night in Eastern Europe on the radio and you could pirate it that way.
WINDOWS 87 There were also legitimately licensed software on western radio stations in similar late night time slots. There was even an initiative to create a shared standard format for such broadcast encoding, so each program didn't have to be broadcast multiple times to cater to different micros, but I don't recall it getting much traction before other distribution methods took over anyway.
WINDOWS 87
In The Netherlands they did a similar thing, using the airwaves to broadcast programs in a format called 'BASICODE' which was basically a subset of BASIC instructions that could be found on all the common microcomputers of that time. It must have been quite popular, because i know that the BASICODE system went through three iterations.
Finally, a regional broadcaster in the UK also had a short run of software broadcasts during the 'off' hours.
4:05 A Wild Techmoan Appears :D
I have a few flexi disc records with multi platform programs on and yes I too have the Thompson twins disc.Two old style tem pence piece stopped it from slipping.We used to get them on cerial packets and car mechanics magazine did one as an audio diagnostic to car faults.
So pleased I grew up when I did.
Prince had a data track on his album "Rave un2 the joy fantastic" in 1999. But no, even 15 years later it didnt catch on.
I had a game for the ZX81 on a floppy vinyl called hitchhike, it was a text adventure.
I have the "Pete Shelley" album "XL-1" with the ZX Spectrum software on... It immediately came to mind when I saw the topic...
I have this vinyl, hopping across to see the full video with the trippy graphics
Excellent video and collaboration
Thanks Paul
just a quick info for those searching for the radiohead thing .. the data track is only on the 20th anniversary re-issue deluxe bundle with the tape (3xLP + tape)! the data track is (sadly) not on vinyl, but the first track on the tape
This is almost like an early example of when bands used to release digipak versions of CDs in the 90's and 00's where you could put the CD into a PC and there would be a shortcut to a hidden section of the band's website or something, or more commonly where a music video was included on the disc as a way of getting them to fans before the internet and TH-cam was what it is today.
" SOFTWARE ON A RECORD!!??!1 "
What's next, AUDIO on a FLOPPY DISK?! Oh, wait... th-cam.com/video/BW4ZFrXqoeY/w-d-xo.htmlm4s
For those who are wondering what vertical turntable Techmoan was using; it's the Sony PS-F9 from 1983.
In March of `85, Kissing The Pink put a computer program on side two of their 12" single for their song, "The Other side Of Heaven".
Oh hey, two of my favorite British TH-camrs in one video. Awesome!
Spectrum games are on the higher end of the spectrum. How poetic
i was so happy when techmoan came on, absolute legend
Love to see the Gamecube in the background of Mat's studio.
Techmoan telling us in-depth knowledge about audio cassettes in a video about home computer software from the RetroManCave, now that's something!
I wonder however if connecting a vinyl player straight to the home computer wouldn't do it.
Isao Tomita's "The Bermuda Triangle" released sometime in 1978 had some TARBEL code on it, although I don't believe it has a full-blown program. Just a few coded messages. I picked it up at a garage sale on pink vinyl.
Bonus Tech Moan content, Nice!
Between 1983 and 2003 there was a programme on German TV called "Computerclub". Almost from the beginning they broadcast software over the audio channel for a few minutes which was called Hardbit Rock. As the hosts couldn't proceed with their topics this system was replaced by VIDEODAT. It transmit the data in a small white rectangle in the corner of the TV screen. You needed a decoder attached to the glass. During one episode about 90 KB were sent to the audience.
MC Frontalot put a hidden track on Zero Day which is a C64 cassette recording of a small program which gives you a code to download a bonus track. :)
Back in the Spectrum days we had a radio broadcast show in the Netherlands (radioscoop or something like that) of about half an hour per week. They transmitted a program in the last minutes. So everybody sat straight up before the radio. Recorder set. Finger on the button to release the pause. Waiting for the promising biiiiiiiip. Those were the days!
I still have this record. Must remember to bring inside from out of the shed.
4:05 if we had these kind of doors in my country you bet we would prank each other with shit through that opening, and when I say shit I mean feces
Blimey... we don't make a habit of poo'ing through each others letterboxes here
This is quite fascinating! First time I've ever heard of this. You have pretty interesting stuff on your channel. I subscribed! 😄
in Poland behind the Iron Curtain, public radio stations broadcast whole games via the radio waves for all the radio listeners to record onto tapes and run into their computers.
As in Buzzcocks Pete Shelley?
Didn't the b-side of Chris earlier ' "I'm I love with the girl in the Manchester virgin Megastore" have a spectrum program on it? if had something for the spectrum on it.
Yes, Pete Shelley from The Buzzcocks. I remember when "Telephone Operator" first came out. As I remember this was produced by Martin Rushent.
Sounds like the sequel to The Buzzcocks' "Why She's a Girl From the Chainstore." ;) One of their best songs, IMO...
There were computer magazine mounted flexi-discs prior to the Thompson Twins one.
I recall purchasing one magazine specifically for the attached flexi circa 1983, which contained games for several machines. I eventually managed to get the game to work on my ZX Spectrum, but couldn't get another track to work on my mate's VIC-20. Likewise I had no luck with the BBC Micro one either. I can't recall the magazine name, as it wasn't one I usually bought. Your Computer magazine also produced cover-mounted flexis around the same time.
Ah! Found it!
It was mounted on the cover of Which Micro? & Software Review (me neither!) sometime in 1983. There's more detail here:
www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0021714
The swedish band "Adolphson & Falk" released an album in 1984 called "Över tid och rum" which included a program for the Atari 800.
First, there was The 8-Bit Guy feat. Techmoan.
Now, there's Retro Man Cave feat. Techmoan.
I hope there's a Techmoan puppet skit at the end of this or part 2!
So awesome you got techmoan on this.
As a fan of Pete Shelley, or at least his time with Buzzcocks, I've been meaning to listen to his solo stuff. I think it's really cool how a lot of punk/new wave artists (my comfort zone) experimented with computer programs on their albums. Aural Sculpture by The Stranglers includes a game, Aural Quest. I heard it's not very good, but I'd still love to have a cassette copy of that cool album anyway!
I would love to hear straight from Pete Shelley what was the motivation and get some more background on this. Being from Canada I missed out on this geek fest so thanks for showcasing this.
A band called Sudden Sway had a Sharp MZ80K data track on a DIY single they released in 1982, which is the earliest example of actual executable code on a record that I've encountered. It certainly beats Camouflage and XL-1 to the punch.
This record you are showing is pretty much the analog version of the AudioCD with CD-ROM track. Often hidden in the first track of the audio CD, that you had to skip or placed as dedicated "enhanced CD" data track on the CD. Something that had been really popular in the 90s when "Multimedia" was the next big thing. The german Techno band Scooter for example had a CD-Rom part on their second album "Our Happy Hardcore" which included a Go-Kart game for IBM compatible PCs.