Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.
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Yes that's exactly right!
When I was about 18 or 19, one of my first jobs was teaching computers at this little office that someone had set up. They had 6 TRS-80 Model 3's. The "Network Controller" from Radio Shack worked just as you described, by Cassette port.
My friend and I convinced the owner to let us build one for him because these things were too expensive (About $1400 I think). So what we did was connect the output of the Teaching computer to a simple audio amp (5 watts maybe, I don't remember), and sent the output of the amp to the input of each TRS-80 via audio cable, and it worked! The students typed CLOAD while the teacher typed CSAVE, and voila!