So there I was, minding my own business, doom-scrolling my way through Facebook posts when I happened upon one that hit me straight in the nostalgia. A photo of a 1980s home computer, a cassette player and some tapes. The text underneath proclaimed "In the 1980s, people could download video games from radio broadcasts by recording the audio onto cassette tapes. These tapes could then be played on computers to load the games". I nodded sagely to myself as I remembered doing just that.

Then I started to read the comments underneath and people were flat-out denying that this had ever happened. The reply guys broadly fell into two camps: the "I have never heard of this, therefore it never happened" and the over confident "expert" saying things like "this would be technically impossible due to some fancy sounding words I've heard like 'hertz', 'compression' and 'frequency shift keying', therefore it never happened".

Just to make sure I was in a spluttering rage the page itself was titled "Unbelievable facts" as if my own childhood had become unbelievable. Although now I think about it it was an unbelievably long time ago, so maybe they have a point.

Anyway, come back with me to the UK in the early 1980s. Recession, strikes, unemployment and the first female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, dominated the news. The home video cassette recorder was only just becoming common, the compact disc wouldn't be launched until the middle of the decade and mobile phone networks didn't even exist. Dexy's Midnight Runners, Irene Cara and Culture Club soundtracked the era and, across the land, the home computer boom was booming.

Computers were new, barely making their way even into the workplace. Most people in office jobs were using typewriters, carbon papers and the postal system. But the microprocessor revolution promised to make computer skills essential to the economy and so the British Broadcasting Corporation began a public education exercise : The BBC Computer Literacy Project.

The BBC's project is best remembered for the TV programmes fronted by Ian McNaught Davis and Chris Serle and, of course, the eponymous BBC Micro specially developed by Acorn to accompany the programmes. Less well known was a Radio 4 series called The Chip Shop. According to the ever reliable internet, it was presented by Barry Norman (much better known as a film critic than a technology expert) although I have no recollection of that.

Home computers at the time were a marvel of cost efficient engineering. Usually consisting of a chunky wedge-shaped keyboard with all the gadgetry inside, it used your normal home TV as a display and a normal portable cassette recorded as a data storage device. Software (which for most of us meant games) would be supplied on an audio cassette on which a series of piercing screeching noises were recorded. You'd hook up the cassette player to your computer, play the screeching noises into your computer through a cable of some description and after a few minutes your game would be loaded up and ready to play. Or, more often, you'd hear several minutes of screeching before the process died with a cryptic message like "R Tape Error" and you'd have to start again.

There were many different companies making these computers all competing for the nascent home market. And, with a few notable exceptions, they were all incompatible with each other and the screeching noises on cassette for, say, your ZX Spectrum would be of no use to the kid next door who had a Commodore 64. This presented a problem for Barry and his Chip Shop. The BBC wanted to broadcast software as part of the radio programme but they'd have to play a different set of screeching noises for each type of computer and their regular listeners would be subjected to twenty minutes of screeching noises at a time.

The solution lay over the water in The Netherlands. The Dutch public broadcaster NOS had encountered the same problem and had developed a system called BASICODE. Often described as a kind of "Computer Esperanto", it allowed the same software to run on different types of computer. You would order a cassette that had BASICODE interpreters for different machines, load up the one that matched your device and then that interpreter would load up the BASICODE program you'd recorded off your radio.

The BBC extended this system as BASICODE 2 (and later 2+) to include more functionality and support more brands of computer. And so was born The Chip Shop Takeaway. Late at night when anyone with any sense was asleep and not listening to their radio, the BBC would broadcast BASICODE programs for home computer enthusiasts to record and use on their machines. To call these "video games" would be a bit of a stretch as BASICODE didn't really support any kind of graphics but I certainly remember some very basic text-based games amongst a load of academic software which meant absolutely nothing to me as an eight year old boy.

Nothing lasts forever though. The mass of competing computer systems became an unsustainable boom market. Manufacturers went broke, the range declined, technology moved on and the boom became a bust. Newer 16 bit machines eschewed cassette storage for new-fangled disk drives and the screeching of a BASICODE takeaway became a forgotten sound on Britain's radio waves. According to Wikipedia BASICODE 3 was also developed and continued to be popular in the old East Germany up until the early 1990s but for those of us in the UK it had already moved into the realm of "unbelievable facts".