Fond memories of "Cursor" magazine from the very dawn of the personal computer era. The earliest issues still had the reversed upper/lowercase from being targeted at the original PET computers. The games and demos were so cool for their era with their cute PETSCII graphics animations and such. And nowadays the whole thing is only a click away...
In a world before the web, and when a modem cost more than a computer, it's hard to overstate how important these tapes were for getting access to new software. They were horribly slow to load from and barely contained any data, but wow they were exciting!
I remember this and probably still have the VHS tapes stored somewhere. The magazine which did this was Mean Machines Sega magazine and they actually did it twice - the second one was the Mega CD/Sega CD promo, the first covered various MegaDrive/Genesis games including Sonic 2. Both seem to be on YouTube below:
As a Canadian kid, I spent summers in Portugal, in my mom's hometown. My grandfather ran the local newsstand, and I spent a lot of my summer vacation reading English computer magazines.
It was a completely different world than the North American magazines we'd get back in Canada. I'd come home, after vacation, with magazines with tapes and eventually floppies.
I don't think I'd be the nerd I am today without those magazines!
Not just cassettes but "vinyl" – a 45rpm single on thin flexible plastic. More space efficient than cassettes for magazine distribution, but a nightmare to load!
The ZX spectrum tapes were great near the end, though you realised that top price games were reaching the magazines so quickly that it clearly _was_ near the end.
This brings back so many memories. Most of them not good...
As a university student in 199mumble I had a side gig as the (freelance) technical writer for Amstrad Action - the magazine that pioneered covertapes, as explained in the article. The actual writing was easy and I could do it in my sleep: mostly answering readers' questions about printers, or reviewing the few applications still being released for the Amstrad CPC.
But I also put together the covertapes. And that was _hard_.
The main drawback is that I was very lucky if I got a master tape of the game. Mostly I just got a standard retail copy. That meant it invariably had copy-protection on of some sort... and I'd have to decrypt that to make a new master for Future Publishing to send to their duplicators (Ablex Audio Video). Fortunately I knew a couple of the best "crackers" working on the CPC, and I wasn't entirely a slouch myself, but even then it was a bunch of unnecessary effort.
As AA neared its end, the editorial team gave me a bit extra to not only produce the cover tape, but to commission the software on it as well. Occasionally I'd turn up a winner. A friend of a friend at university turned out to know the author of Chuckie Egg, the all-time classic 8-bit platform game, so I got that pretty easily. (Without copy protection!) That was a good moment. But often it'd just be some less than impressive game from the late 80s that hadn't sold particularly well first time round.
And as the article alludes, there were inevitably bugs. Finding out, after 10,000 copies of a tape have been duplicated, that it won't work properly on one of the three models of CPC... that wasn't a great moment. Ah well. We printed a bugfix in the next issue. Tapes were sufficiently unreliable that I suspect half the users just thought there was a loading error anyway.
Hat tip to you, my friend! A small data point as to how your bad memories balance out the universe.
Despite not having a lot of disposable income, my parents got me a subscription to AA (staring somewhere in the late 80s). Receiving each new edition was the most exciting thing in the world as a kid. I could not wait to get home and see what was on the tape this time. The magic of software that was instilled in me in those moments has stayed with me for life.
Same but YC, and the game was Microdot. I used to scrutinise every line of those magazines, now I can barely scroll to the bottom of a single link without switching apps twice.
Copy protection of tape games took a different form. It wasn’t that you couldn’t make a copy, but there were extra barriers to making it playable. Eg Jet Set Willy came with a card on which was printed a coloured grid, and upon loading the game prompted you to enter the colours found at random coordinates before it would start. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/57256/Jet-Set-Willy-C...
Copying that card was high effort, since no one had camera phones or scanners or photocopiers etc.
If I remember correctly when the 128K Spectrum came out they changed some bytes in the top end of the 16K ROM that had been used frequently by games as an Interrupt Mode 2 vector table (point I register to be the high byte of the address) so that they could page in and out between the old and new ROM.
Elite was affected so Firebird (subsidiary of British Telecom) would let you get a new tape that fixed this bug but it also removed the LensLok protection code.
I hated those things. Tomahawk on the Spectrum had a Lenslok - and our little 14" CRT TV had an external flat bit of glass that required you to unfold the lenslok and hold steady at just the right place. Even worse than it was on a normal curved screen.
Most of my Elite experience was later on the Amiga version (no lenslok). It was a little anemic on the Spectrum.
I seem to remember some tapes were designed to load faster or otherwise decrease the margin of error when reading the tones, such that it wouldn't easily survive the degradation of tape to tape copying. Probably at the expense of the original not being as reliable.
I was a kid at the time so could be wrong about this.
Amstrad Action was a major part of my youth, and kickstarted several interests of mine e.g. hearing the track by "Urban Dance Terrorists" which made it onto several of my personal mixtapes, then BooTracker getting me into writing my own music on the computer. I also attempted to write an adventure game in GAC and anything at all in assembly language thanks to the free covertape apps, and failed utterly on both accounts. I did love all the type-ins, though, and perhaps writing small programs in Locomotive BASIC is what ultimately led me to becoming a software developer.
AA prompted my first email too, when I asked my mom - who worked at a university - to email The Pilgrim or The Balrog or one of those guys for a hint on a game I was stuck on. And he replied! It was like magic.
The games weren't all that bad! I remember getting Stormlord and Dizzy from the tape, which was super cool because I had been reading about both for years and unable to play them because nobody I knew was able to acquire a copy. The more disappointing ones where when they came with a game I already had, like Exolon/Uridium/Zynaps/Ranarama, all of which were already on the Hewson smash hits compilation I'd played to bits, but I'm sure some other kids out there loved them. Good times.
i would not say that it was lovely, but it generally came off without tearing. i suppose you could do potentially obscene things with it, once you got it off. not that i not do any such stuff, of course.
My memory of early Your Sinclair covermount cassettes is definitely that they were stuck on with a strip of tape that usually stripped off some of the cassette label when it was torn off. The tapes weren't even in boxes - gluing them to the cover would have been a recipe for gumming up the reels.
I definitely remember a sort of rubbery glue. I never had a Spectrum, so maybe different mags did different things? But of course this all a very long time ago!
Cover tapes, then cover floppies, then cover discs were how I acquired the vast majority of my software as a kid, in the pre-internet and then the achingly slow internet days.
I was also, as mentioned, a kid, and therefore penniless until I started making money doing software at 12 — C64 magazines I got via school from the science teacher, but later on at another school I’d toddle down to WH Smith, scoop up Amiga Shopper/Format/Power, PC Gamer/World/Pro/Mag, take them home, copy the discs over the older cover floppies that I’d drilled to be able to write, reseal them, and return them for store credit. I’d repeat the shenanigan once a month, occasionally keeping a particularly cool issue if I was feeling flush.
I figured I was stealing marketing, and only pirating it at that - and as an adult with a clear understanding of how the magazine industry worked, as I ended up providing technical services to a large publisher in the early noughts, I honestly don’t feel bad. Until the death knell of broadband, they were raking it in on both sides from advertisers and consumers. That and I learned so much from the various software I nicked over the years.
What American software houses didn't understand was that in the days of dialup, Europeans paid for ALL phone calls. Including local calls. We paid by the minute for dial-up internet. Downloading a new web browser could cost £20 or something, and gods help you if someone picked up an extension phone and disconnected you -- 1990s browsers could not resume, so you had to start again.
So we put all that stuff on the CD: Paint Shop Pro, IrfanView, WinAmp, all sorts.
Some readers bought the mag just for the CD, to save hours of downloaded updates. Field engineers carried the latest CD with them to update customers' machines.
We always had the latest Internet Explorer on it. All Windows >=98 users needed that, as it updated bits of your OS too.
We wanted Netscape too, for balance. They wouldn't let us. In the end, the editor invited me onto a transatlantic phone call to explain why.
The Netscape execs wanted the tracking info on who downloaded it, from where. They couldn't understand why so few Europeans downloaded Netscape. I told them: it's because it costs us money.
"No, no, you don't understand. It's on the innernet."
(That is how the American English pronunciation of "internet" sounds to a Brit. The inner-net.)
"Yes, but we pay to connect."
"No, you don't get it," Netscape patronisingly told me. "Once you're online, you're not paying any more. It doesn't matter if it takes hours. It's a free download."
"No," I told them, "YOU don't understand. We pay for internet access."
"Sure, but it's unmetered."
"No, it isn't. That's just in the USA. Here, we pay by the minute."
"What? No it isn't! You don't have to dial us! You don't dial America! It's not a bulletin board! It's the innernet! It's a local call!"
"No, YOU do not understand. We pay for local calls. Local calls in the rest of the world are metered. We pay by the minute for internet access."
"OMG, what? That can't be right! Local calls are free!"
"Only in America. Here they are metered. We pay by the minute for internet access. Everyone does. So downloading your browser costs a lot of money. That's why we put IE on our cover disks. It saves readers a big paid download."
They were stunned. They had no idea. This was why MS owned web access in Europe.
It had never occurred to them that US toll charges were not a universal.
45 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadhttp://www.zimmers.net/anonftp/pub/cbm/magazines/cursor/inde...
That was amazing to me in those pre-VOD days.
Preview including Sonic 2: https://youtu.be/uJjLV6YNxeI
Mega CD promo: https://youtu.be/DYCIiVwsGL8
It was a completely different world than the North American magazines we'd get back in Canada. I'd come home, after vacation, with magazines with tapes and eventually floppies.
I don't think I'd be the nerd I am today without those magazines!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/FloppyRo...
There was also software distributed on Flexi Disc. I'm pretty sure there was for C64 too.
Yes, I have one stashed away somewhere. I think it came with an issue of Compute!'s Gazette, though I'm not entirely sure.
I had the job of QC on PC Zone's cover CDs for a while. It was a _lot_ of work.
As a university student in 199mumble I had a side gig as the (freelance) technical writer for Amstrad Action - the magazine that pioneered covertapes, as explained in the article. The actual writing was easy and I could do it in my sleep: mostly answering readers' questions about printers, or reviewing the few applications still being released for the Amstrad CPC.
But I also put together the covertapes. And that was _hard_.
The main drawback is that I was very lucky if I got a master tape of the game. Mostly I just got a standard retail copy. That meant it invariably had copy-protection on of some sort... and I'd have to decrypt that to make a new master for Future Publishing to send to their duplicators (Ablex Audio Video). Fortunately I knew a couple of the best "crackers" working on the CPC, and I wasn't entirely a slouch myself, but even then it was a bunch of unnecessary effort.
As AA neared its end, the editorial team gave me a bit extra to not only produce the cover tape, but to commission the software on it as well. Occasionally I'd turn up a winner. A friend of a friend at university turned out to know the author of Chuckie Egg, the all-time classic 8-bit platform game, so I got that pretty easily. (Without copy protection!) That was a good moment. But often it'd just be some less than impressive game from the late 80s that hadn't sold particularly well first time round.
And as the article alludes, there were inevitably bugs. Finding out, after 10,000 copies of a tape have been duplicated, that it won't work properly on one of the three models of CPC... that wasn't a great moment. Ah well. We printed a bugfix in the next issue. Tapes were sufficiently unreliable that I suspect half the users just thought there was a loading error anyway.
Despite not having a lot of disposable income, my parents got me a subscription to AA (staring somewhere in the late 80s). Receiving each new edition was the most exciting thing in the world as a kid. I could not wait to get home and see what was on the tape this time. The magic of software that was instilled in me in those moments has stayed with me for life.
Learning from TFA that they nearly failed with their Amstrad offering yet ended up buying Your Sinclair is a spooky synchronicity!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lbbQdwu1djc
Copying that card was high effort, since no one had camera phones or scanners or photocopiers etc.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/56946/Lenslok-Softwar...
Trying to play Elite on Christmas Day and repeatedly failing to enter the correct two letters!
Elite was affected so Firebird (subsidiary of British Telecom) would let you get a new tape that fixed this bug but it also removed the LensLok protection code.
Most of my Elite experience was later on the Amiga version (no lenslok). It was a little anemic on the Spectrum.
I was a kid at the time so could be wrong about this.
Amstrad Action was a major part of my youth, and kickstarted several interests of mine e.g. hearing the track by "Urban Dance Terrorists" which made it onto several of my personal mixtapes, then BooTracker getting me into writing my own music on the computer. I also attempted to write an adventure game in GAC and anything at all in assembly language thanks to the free covertape apps, and failed utterly on both accounts. I did love all the type-ins, though, and perhaps writing small programs in Locomotive BASIC is what ultimately led me to becoming a software developer.
AA prompted my first email too, when I asked my mom - who worked at a university - to email The Pilgrim or The Balrog or one of those guys for a hint on a game I was stuck on. And he replied! It was like magic.
The games weren't all that bad! I remember getting Stormlord and Dizzy from the tape, which was super cool because I had been reading about both for years and unable to play them because nobody I knew was able to acquire a copy. The more disappointing ones where when they came with a game I already had, like Exolon/Uridium/Zynaps/Ranarama, all of which were already on the Hewson smash hits compilation I'd played to bits, but I'm sure some other kids out there loved them. Good times.
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/12/8594049/aol-free-trial-cds
perhaps "The British computer magazine cover CASSETTE tape"?
My memory of early Your Sinclair covermount cassettes is definitely that they were stuck on with a strip of tape that usually stripped off some of the cassette label when it was torn off. The tapes weren't even in boxes - gluing them to the cover would have been a recipe for gumming up the reels.
I was also, as mentioned, a kid, and therefore penniless until I started making money doing software at 12 — C64 magazines I got via school from the science teacher, but later on at another school I’d toddle down to WH Smith, scoop up Amiga Shopper/Format/Power, PC Gamer/World/Pro/Mag, take them home, copy the discs over the older cover floppies that I’d drilled to be able to write, reseal them, and return them for store credit. I’d repeat the shenanigan once a month, occasionally keeping a particularly cool issue if I was feeling flush.
I figured I was stealing marketing, and only pirating it at that - and as an adult with a clear understanding of how the magazine industry worked, as I ended up providing technical services to a large publisher in the early noughts, I honestly don’t feel bad. Until the death knell of broadband, they were raking it in on both sides from advertisers and consumers. That and I learned so much from the various software I nicked over the years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Selection
It was a collation of the various PD, freeware, shareware and FOSS apps that we normally added to a new PC.
Nowadays you can just use Ninite, of course.
https://ninite.com/
What American software houses didn't understand was that in the days of dialup, Europeans paid for ALL phone calls. Including local calls. We paid by the minute for dial-up internet. Downloading a new web browser could cost £20 or something, and gods help you if someone picked up an extension phone and disconnected you -- 1990s browsers could not resume, so you had to start again.
So we put all that stuff on the CD: Paint Shop Pro, IrfanView, WinAmp, all sorts.
Some readers bought the mag just for the CD, to save hours of downloaded updates. Field engineers carried the latest CD with them to update customers' machines.
We always had the latest Internet Explorer on it. All Windows >=98 users needed that, as it updated bits of your OS too.
We wanted Netscape too, for balance. They wouldn't let us. In the end, the editor invited me onto a transatlantic phone call to explain why.
The Netscape execs wanted the tracking info on who downloaded it, from where. They couldn't understand why so few Europeans downloaded Netscape. I told them: it's because it costs us money.
"No, no, you don't understand. It's on the innernet."
(That is how the American English pronunciation of "internet" sounds to a Brit. The inner-net.)
"Yes, but we pay to connect."
"No, you don't get it," Netscape patronisingly told me. "Once you're online, you're not paying any more. It doesn't matter if it takes hours. It's a free download."
"No," I told them, "YOU don't understand. We pay for internet access."
"Sure, but it's unmetered."
"No, it isn't. That's just in the USA. Here, we pay by the minute."
"What? No it isn't! You don't have to dial us! You don't dial America! It's not a bulletin board! It's the innernet! It's a local call!"
"No, YOU do not understand. We pay for local calls. Local calls in the rest of the world are metered. We pay by the minute for internet access."
"OMG, what? That can't be right! Local calls are free!"
"Only in America. Here they are metered. We pay by the minute for internet access. Everyone does. So downloading your browser costs a lot of money. That's why we put IE on our cover disks. It saves readers a big paid download."
They were stunned. They had no idea. This was why MS owned web access in Europe.
It had never occurred to them that US toll charges were not a universal.