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rwmjtoday at 1:15 PM3 repliesview on HN

Nice little project.

Back in day, magazines distributed software on flexidisc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc) I remember it being very unreliable. The magazine instructed you to copy the flexidisc to a cassette tape first as you could only usually play the disc one or two times.


Replies

bpoynertoday at 6:51 PM

I remember getting floppy disks in magazines, I've used cassette tapes with a Commodore 64, I also remember flexidiscs for music, but I've never heard of the flexidisc as a software medium. Where was this?

I found a reference to a Thompson Twins game distributed by flexidisc in the UK.

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JimDabelltoday at 4:43 PM

Yes, I had an Acorn Electron (a BBC Micro-compatible), and the software came on audio cassettes and were sometimes taped to the front of computer magazines to share software demos. It was basically a modem that wasn’t hooked up to a telephone. If the tape was getting worn out, you occasionally had to fix it by putting a pencil in one of the gears and winding it a bit tighter. You could copy software with any dual tape deck designed for music.

forintitoday at 2:07 PM

Cool. I remember getting one such disc in a music magazine in the 80s. It occured to me then that you could maybe put software on it, but I never saw this implemented.