Some were. I remember calling support for the game “Quarantine”, and they sent me a 3.5" patch disk in the mail. And it didn’t help. :-)
I suppose when I was a kid there wasn’t much technical support from Razor1911 or the humble guys.
I remember receiving unsolicited an update 3.5" disk for the Amiga version of Breach. I don’t recall if there was anything in the original version that required patching or updating, because I never had any problems with it.
I remember getting stuck in some RPG on my C64 and sending a letter to the company asking how something worked, and getting a handwritten response giving me suggestions. That’s how we rolled back then! And I’m going to use this gif a second time today:
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
>
Throw the axe at the dwarf.
>HINT
go west
YOU FELL INTO A PIT AND BROKE EVERY BONE IN YOUR BODY!
NOW YOU’VE REALLY DONE IT! I’M OUT OF ORANGE SMOKE! YOU DON’T EXPECT
ME TO DO A DECENT REINCARNATION WITHOUT ANY ORANGE SMOKE, DO YOU?
yes
OKAY, IF YOU’RE SO SMART, DO IT YOURSELF! I’M LEAVING!
and, of course: PLOVER
I had a friend who had one of those in his families basement. He was the only guy I knew who had access to something like that. That would have been early 70s.
You kids are spoiled. In my day it took half an hour to load a game from a cassette, and that’s assuming no physical problems with the tape.
Oh yeah, I had a TRS-80 with a tape drive, and I loved that thing like a fat kid loves candy because I could store all the dumb little programs I would write. In fact some nights, when the wind is just right, I could swear I hear the sound of a program loading from tape …
Nice try.
I’ve seen one of those. We had a guy who worked servers for years at my last site that liked to talk about cards, and of course know one would know what he was talking about and would pull his stash out to watch everyone look at them in wonder.
I miss him. He went into retirement. I hear he biked across two states or so for fun.
My local bank had a mainframe in the basement. We would visit from the Elementary school each year. They would show us a tape drive and then print out a big ASCII art Snoopy. They never let us keep it though. Bastards.
:)
I had a history teacher freshman year of highschool bring one in and he knew how to use it. I don’t remember much more than that.
You could still buy these from variety stores back in the 70s, built in Japan out of cheap tin (stylus, too).