Comment by rwmj
9 hours ago
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.
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.
They would come in computer mags. Byte, Compute, Creative Computing. Hobbyist magazines. You had to record them to your cassette drive first.
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.
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.