Thanks to Dave O for posting a blog reminding me about the Beagle Brothers. I remember those all-too-well, from the days of Byte and Nibble? magazine(s).
Before the internet, there were BBSes. Rather than 1 computer calling every computer in the world, 1 computer called JUST 1 computer. But that was advanced stuff; that didn’t happen for me until 1988. And I never physically met another human being that did this (outside of planned gatherings) until 1992 or so. But what about my computer years of 1980-1988? How did you download back then?
Well, you bought a huge book full of programs, and spent up to a month typing one in (I did this with Eliza, then promptly accidentally deleted the file. At age 8, this damaged my spirit permanently.) Or you’d look in the last page of Byte or Nibble magazine for their “oneliners” section (and later, “twoliners”). These were programs that were one line long (256 characters), that did all kinds of amazing things. You could type one up in 2-3 minutes — faster than many files I download today.
But of course even these only came once or twice a month!
Enter the Beagle Brothers. Their advertisements used stylized 19th century figures (Dave posted an example on his blog). It was an interesting marketing tactic, because back then, computers may as well have been in the 19th century! I had to save 3 months’ allowance to get a 16K memory upgrade. That’s 0.0015% the size of the gig of RAM most machines have now. I would have had to save my allowance for 16,384 years to get a gig of memory back then, and it would fill a room.
Anyway, the Beagle Brothers ads sometimes had oneliners of their own incorporated into the ads! To date, these are the only advertisements I’ve ever seen that were, in a sense, “downloadable content” (unless you count CueCat barcodes, but those never caught on). The only ads ever that were actually programs. Check out the 2 examples HERE. Other nostalgic memories of these ads are posted on the Beagle Brothers webpage HERE. Thanks for reminding me of the memories, Dave! And thanks being cutting-edge (in the 1980s) with the magazine subscriptions, Dad!
Claire's blog 
January 16, 2008 at 5:59 AM
I remember typing in game programs in machine language, only to find that the programs didn’t work, and I had mistyped several hex characters, which I didn’t discover until re-reading and comparing many columns of friggin’ hexadecimal numbers against what I had typed in. Sometimes my Dad would help me by reading out the hexadecimal numbers to me so I could type them in more quickly. Good times!
Then, some magician at Nibble figured out the wonders of checksumming, and for each row of hex numbers you’d type in, a verification value would appear. If it was different than the one printed in the magazine, then you very quickly discovered that you messed something up. It was a godsend.
nibblemagazine.net sells a DVD of nibble magazine scans – here’s a sample:
January 16, 2008 at 6:11 AM
I couldn’t help myself – I had to snag an Apple emulator to try out the Jackzip oneline:
It plays a monotone version of “Shave and a Haircut”. :)
January 16, 2008 at 11:55 AM
hahahaha, nice!!
I considered typing it up too, but my apple.bat no longer pointed to the right emulator directory and I got lazy.. hehe.
Someone should put all the Nibble magazines in a torrent somewhere. :)
January 20, 2008 at 11:37 AM
Hi, great to see others who remember the old days!!
I can safely say I spent 2 years typing in progs from books. We didn’t have the cash for games so you got the books and mags from the library lol
Spend weeks debugging looking for a typo…..friends thinking you were “weird”. Great Times man!
Actually taught me focus, attention to detail and concentration tbh!
Maybe thats whats needed in todays generation! Pleased to meet you all!!!
;)