And before they started sending the free CDs they would send 3.5" floppies! Need a another floppy disk? It was just a phone call and format away! Shipped!
This is AWESOME! But, I absolutely love this time period of computing history.
It was around this time (late 70s), before storage was accessible to computer nerds, that the Kansas City Standard was developed. It provided a cheap and easy way to store "large" amounts of data on standard audio cassettes which were cheap and easy to come by!
It really opened up a lot of things! People no longer needed to retype their programs in to the computer every time they turned it on, it was now easy to share & copy data with friends, and it ALSO gave us the ability to broadcast programs over the radio (like this article is doing!).
The original Kansas City Standard was pretty slow (300 baud), but other standards were developed shortly after (CUTS [Bob Marsh] is one) which provided more speed (1200 baud) and even backward compatibility with KCS.
If anyone is interested in a the dirty details of how KCS all works, I did a series on it (https://youtu.be/6m7vDhscGzU). And am working on covering CUTS in the near future!