Decius wrote:

Before the Apple II had floppy drives, however, it had an audio cassette interface for storing programs and data.  This was a very primitive system, requiring you to hook up a cassette recorder to your computer and fiddle with the volume knob until things started working.  To read data from tape, you specified a range of memory to fill, and hit the "play" button on your tape recorder.  If all went well, the computer cheerfully beeped at you and off you went.  Loading BASIC programs was even easier, because the start location was pre-determined, and the length was stored on the tape.  All you had to do was type "LOAD".

I recently found myself extracting software from cassette tapes purchased on eBay.  At the start of the project, I thought to myself, "it's awkward to get at the data, but at least there's no copy protection."  As it turns out, I was wrong.

A little walk down memory lane.

The history of nibble copiers for floppies is a fun read too.