In the early 1980s, a Dutch radio broadcaster figured out how to transmit video games over standard commercial radio broadcasts — and teenagers across Europe would sit with blank cassette tapes waiting for the local station to broadcast a series of high-pitched squeaks and buzzes that they could record and load into their home computers (opens in new tab)

In 1980, somewhere in the Netherlands, a radio engineer at the Dutch broadcasting organisation NOS noticed something almost embarrassingly obvious that the entire computer industry had overlooked. Home computers, at that point, mostly stored their programs on audio cassettes — ordinary compact cassettes, the same blank tapes people used to record music off the radio. […]