Remember the cassette wars? (1970 - 1980) need your help

SolarNexus

I'm required to write a report for university, and I'm comming up a bit short on the backstory. The report is basically about internet piracy and the like, but I have chosen to give some backstory of the first 'file sharing networks', back when cassette decks where the in-thing (before my time unfortunately). So basically I need the following:

* any links to sites with reliable information about tape-swapping, copyright infringement from 1960 to 1980 etc.

* a point of view from someone who remembers the 'good old days', when there was uproar about people recording music off the radio, onto vhs cassettes etc.

* any other info


now, I know I'm not technically in a forum thats for 'homework help' but this is the closest thing I can find on boards.ie and I'm in a bit of a bind as I really should be completed by now... not just starting :rolleyes:

Krusty_Clown

More mid-80s, but you really should look to the Apple II, Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 era, which spawned a lot of the 'scene'.

Wikipedia.org is your friend.. Some starting points:
The Scene
Demoscene
Crack Intro

Here's some stories from the old C64 cracking groups:
http://www.c64-hof.com/groups/f/fusion/history.htm
http://www.acc.umu.se/~tao/myself/c64life.html
http://www.neoscientists.org/~cmuehlan/tekc64/
http://www.ojuice.net/2825/article.htm
http://www.etext.org/CuD//Illegal/

Awesomo

I remember most music tapes came with a skull and crossbones, with a message like "Home taping is killing music"

The Sinclair Spectrum worked from a normal tape recorder. That is, it didn't come with a tape deck, you just attached your own cassette radio. Double tape deck usually meant you have no problem copying the games.

The Commodore 64, which I had, came with its own tape deck. Tape to tape wouldn't work. We used Freeze Frame. Still make stuff to this day, for consoles I think.
Anyway, the Freeze Frame cartidge allowed you to copy a picture of the RAM onto tape. So if you were copying for a friend, you could take the copy when the game loaded. However, that wasn't its main use for me. In those days, lots of games didn't have save points. You were expected to play the same levels again and again before you could advance. Other times, you could only save at the end of a level - when the next level would load. The screen would go all multi coloured bars while you waited for the next level.
The FF Cartidge would let you save anywhere. Just copy the RAM to the tape, and load that up when you next played. If you finished the level, just insert the original tape and it would load the next level. Happy days!

Guy:Incognito

Awesomo wrote:

The Commodore 64, which I had, came with its own tape deck. Tape to tape wouldn't work. We used Freeze Frame. !

Yeah it did, I used to rent and copy games all the time using a double tape deck.

Awesomo

Really? I thought there was some copy protection thing to stop it working.
Ah well!

SouperComputer

Awesomo wrote:

Really? I thought there was some copy protection thing to stop it working.
Ah well!

I remember messing with the head alignment when I was a kid, but yea C64 and atari 800 games copied for me no bother.

Capt'n Midnight

BBC Micro games could be copied tape to tape too.

BBC had a nice feature where you could rewind the tape back a bit if a block didn't load.