rowan

In the mid 1980s I attended a computer class held in the back room of a Tandy Electronics store (which was the Australian version of Radio Shack). There was a room full of these machines, but the majority had no floppy or hard drives. So how did you get programs onto them? The method used was ingenious: students type CLOAD (load program from cassette) and then the instructor CSAVEs the program on his master computer (which did have storage). All of the computer's cassette ports were connected to the instructor's computer, so that they could simultaneously listen to the broadcast of the program it was "saving", via the cassette port. Pretty amazing that you could set up a rudimentary network using nothing more than a simple analog distribution amplifier.