> Back then, the storage is was much more 'real': it was slow, made noises, degraded noticeably because of stray magnetic fields etc, complicated mechanical parts. By the hearing alone, you may spot problems.

And it also could involve manual manipulation of things holding the data.

I may not have ever worked with lots of switches or cards or big reel-to-reels, but for our family’s first computer we had a Radio Shack cassette player that I could hook to it to load software. It was an ordeal to put in a tape, rewind if necessary and coordinate pressing play on the cassette tape player with the load command I had to enter in to load a program. Those were the days!

I could also record and load my own programs from the tapes. Press the record and play buttons at the same time and hit enter on that keyboard!

Granted our first computer also had cartridges, but I only had a few for it.

It was like Christmas (or literally was Christmas) whenever we got new software from anywhere, whether it was from Radio Shack or a bookstore that had a few or more tapes available.

That’s why I started to program. It was fun, and it was the only way to get new software whenever I wanted it. Early on it was entering programs from the manual, but I learned quickly to write my own.

When I later got a 5 1/4” floppy drive, it was so awesome, especially once I got an Apple and could trade/copy disks from others, stores, a local college, and the library.

Even once we got a modem, you still had put the data somewhere, so it went on floppies.

Everything was physical and novel then. It was so awesome.

Same feels here too. Cassette was kindnof magical and kind of crappy. Well, depending on your machine, potentially very crappy.

One of the better cassette loaders can be found in the 6809 based Tandy CoCo machines. When in the cassette times, I would stress test various machines.

My Atari was bog slow, reading a block at a time, with a pause between... And it was picky and really wanted the dedicated cassette drive. Not recommended at all..

Apples were pretty OK, along with the Tandy machines. The Tandy reader software, whoever wrote it, took full advantage of the nice CPU and 6 bit DAC. I could rest a finger on the tape, slowing it down, then listening to the wow, flutter and speed changes all over the place while the machine recovered. Almost always loaded correctly.

The Apples were not that robust, but worked well enough to not be a big bother.

Both Apple and Tandy machines had good commands for loading and saving right to regions of RAM.

On the Apple, with the spiffy Mini-assembler, it was possible to develop big programs a piece at a time, saving off stuff that worked.

Every so often, it made sense to read a bunch in and save off a nice chunk! Always felt good doing that.

Eventually, you load it all, patch it up, linker style, maybe moving bits around some, and then save it as a completed assembly program.

No source, just the data on the tape and what the mini-assembler would show you when you list memory.

Good times!