>I had a Datasette. It was expensive at the time, and it was amazing that it worked at all.
It was expensive in the beginning, but later on it was cheap, at least in comparison to the 1541 floppy disk drive which was in the same price region as the C64 itself.
If you look at the hardware this is not surprising. The Datasette was basically a slightly modified cassette player. The Atari "Datasette" (410 Program Recorder) even looked like the typical portable cassette player of the time and could be used like one. It could play audio cassettes through an internal speaker. The 1541 and the 1541 II on the other hand were little 8-bit computers in their own right. They contained a 6502 (almost the same CPU as the C64) and there was software to use the floppy CPU as a co-processor.
>You could put one of the C64 tapes into your boom box and play them, and hear a series of unpleasant screeches and whoops.
You could not only play them, you could conveniently copy them with your boom box. This was the way software was pirated back then. A dual deck boom box with high speed dubbing - much faster than copying with the computer.
In the Netherlands there were also experiments where software was sent on FM radio. You recorded it on a audio cassette which you could then use in your Datasette.
While most people used regular 60 minutes audio cassettes for software there existed special 7 minute cassettes for some time. This saved you from a lot of winding and rewinding when you missed the program start.
They also invented a kind of internal DSL within BASIC to get around inconsistencies in various BASIC dialects used by different platforms at the time.
That is amazing. Different manufacturers' dialects of basic were barely the same language. I think the only things generally held in common were basic logic and control flow, very basic string manipulation, printing characters line-by-line, and prompting the user to enter a string. It sounds like these guys essentially created a shared function library (libraries and functions were completely alien to BASIC!) and successful ported that library to a couple of dozen different computers, some of them with only 16KB of RAM.
(Technically functions were supported in some dialects at least, but they had to fit on one line and could only do mathematical operations, so they would be useless here.)
It was expensive in the beginning, but later on it was cheap, at least in comparison to the 1541 floppy disk drive which was in the same price region as the C64 itself.
If you look at the hardware this is not surprising. The Datasette was basically a slightly modified cassette player. The Atari "Datasette" (410 Program Recorder) even looked like the typical portable cassette player of the time and could be used like one. It could play audio cassettes through an internal speaker. The 1541 and the 1541 II on the other hand were little 8-bit computers in their own right. They contained a 6502 (almost the same CPU as the C64) and there was software to use the floppy CPU as a co-processor.
>You could put one of the C64 tapes into your boom box and play them, and hear a series of unpleasant screeches and whoops.
You could not only play them, you could conveniently copy them with your boom box. This was the way software was pirated back then. A dual deck boom box with high speed dubbing - much faster than copying with the computer.
In the Netherlands there were also experiments where software was sent on FM radio. You recorded it on a audio cassette which you could then use in your Datasette.
While most people used regular 60 minutes audio cassettes for software there existed special 7 minute cassettes for some time. This saved you from a lot of winding and rewinding when you missed the program start.
Good times, good times...