1982 · Broadcast Software Standard · Work 982 of 1,871
The living room of a flat in Utrecht in the Netherlands on a winter evening, on a table covered with a small patterned rug in deep red a wooden radio with a plain dial window glowing warm amber, a thin grey cable running from its side to a flat black portable cassette recorder, a fingertip holding down its record key, two small white reels turning behind its clear window, beside it a small flat home computer of cream plastic with a plain smooth case, every key plain, smooth and unmarked, a cup of coffee on a saucer, a tall uncurtained window onto lit gabled houses across a dark canal.
What it was used for
BASICODE was a set of rules by which radio stations broadcast computer programs as an audio signal. Listeners taped the broadcast and loaded it into their home computer. It was carried by the Dutch public broadcaster NOS and its programme Hobbyscoop, which had been transmitting microcomputer software since 1978: Klaas Robers, an employee at Philips in Eindhoven, proposed the system, Hobbyscoop producer Hans Janssen organised the collaboration, Jochem Herrmann co-designed BASICODE-2, Jacques Haubrich vetted the broadcast programs (Veraart 2008). It was taken up by WDR 3, by the BBC's The Chip Shop and by stations in Belgium, Denmark and Australia; from 1989 GDR radio broadcast it too.
What was new
What marks it is the direction of the standardisation: not the machines were made compatible, but the programs. BASICODE fixed a lowest common denominator of BASIC; everything each machine did differently — clearing the screen, setting the cursor — sat in subroutines that every computer type had to supply itself. The price: without the translation program for his exact model, a listener could do nothing with the broadcast. In 1985, Veraart reports, about 30,000 of the 200,000 home computer owners in the Netherlands listened regularly. Dutch broadcasts ended with the reorganisation of Dutch broadcasting in September 1991, by which time the IBM-compatible PC had ended the very diversity BASICODE had been built for.
What the sources leave open: Veraart dates the public introduction to August 1981, BASICODE-2 to July 1983 and BASICODE-3 to July 1986; the year 1982 falls between those marks. The 1985 listener figure is given by Veraart as a report. The details of the cassette format come from a private individual, not from a published standard.