Were Cassettes ever computer transferable?
 

Say I did simple
10 Rem ***This is a test***
On a C64 a simple command that I think exists on all versions of Basic and save it to tape and put it into another computer is there any chance of loading this?

Not really. All systems used their own data encoding formats, similar to how they all used their own floppy formats. The best way to transfer like that would have been over serial or something like that.

Sort of - there were the Kansas city standard (yes, had to look up the name). However many common computers used their own format and even if not the actual format of the data varies between computers (BASIC token codes etc.).

But if the target (victim?) hardware supports reading the source tape and have enough memory to convert the data it should be possible with some effort.

It may be possible with an intermediate machine with audio input and enough raw power.
Then a program would input the tape as wave, analyze it to extract the binary data, convert that data to normal text, retokenize that text for the target machine, build another wave with that, and then output the audio to write a tape with the wave. After that, the new tape could be loaded on the end machine.
(Phew. Hopefully i could transfer my oric files to atari st with rs-232 back in the day...)

Ok I remember hearing years ago this might be possible but never tried it

It sure was possible and actually happened over in The Netherlands :)

A computer oriented radio show on the public broadcasting network created it's own multi-format compatible tape format and released loaders for the format for many computers. These loaders also included a special form of BASIC that was guaranteed to be compatible across the different computers.

So you could record a BASICODE program of the radio onto cassette and all the main 8-bit computers could then load it (provided they had a loader program). If you had the ability to get sound data into a PC or Amiga, they too could actually load the data.

And once you had a BASICODE loader/saver, you could share your data and BASICODE programs with other users as well, regardless of the computer system they used.

See more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE

Quite innovative!

Interesting also a Radio station giving away Demos of games etc would have been cool.

Quote from BASICODE Wiki

"A problem was that sharing programs and data across computers by different manufacturers was difficult because the various BASIC dialects were totally incompatible in some areas. They used different BASIC commands to make the same action (like clearing the screen, drawing a pixel or playing a sound), so that a BASIC program written for the C64 did not work on an Atari XL without modification and vice versa. Another difficulty was the fact that while these computers were similar, they still differed in key hardware aspects like screen resolution, available color palette or audio abilities. Finally, the data formats used for storing data on cassette were incompatible as well."

"There were BASICODE 2 Bascoders for the Exidy Sorcerer, Colour Genie, Commodore PET, VIC-20, C64, Amiga,,..................

very interesting. It means that they had to rewrite a cassette loader not using ROM loader. I had an Oric and never heard of that.

I suppose that the bascoder program took a lot of memory so it limited the size of the programs. Well, looks cool for the time. SDL & Java of the 80's :)

A Dragon 32 can load most TRS-80 CoCo 1 cassettes. Mostly because they are 95% the same hardware and ran the same Microsoft BASIC.

I think they were both based around a Motorola reference design rather than being clones. BASIC used a different encoding but I had a cartridge that did the necessary conversion.

I think I have a Dragon 32 magazine that has listings for some kind of coversion program for the CoCo.