media what died a'bornin'

You're thinking of 'Basicode', which actually started in The Netherlands. The thing was that the programs were sort-of universal, and could be run on most home computers of the time (TRS-80, PET, Apple ][, BBC micro, etc). You got a translator tape that was machine-specific (actually, it was one tape with machine-specific programs recorded one after the other on it, you loaded the appropriate one for your machine), then you could load and run any Basicode program. The audio format was essentially CUTS 1200 baud, and machine-specific commands (like 'clear screen' which was CLS on a TRS80, HOME on some other machines, etc) were replaced with GOSUBs to particular line numbers -- part of the translator was a set of BASIC subroutines. And you didn't normally connect the radio to the computer. It was better to record the programs on tape, the load them into the computer later. That way you had a second chance if you got the volume setting wrong or something :-) There was also a scheme to transmit BBC BASIC programs on teletext (a text service trasmitted on normal TV signals, sent during the field blanking interval). The BBC micro had a couple of teletext decoders available for it (one from Acorn, a rather better one from Morley), and you could directly load these programs into your Beeb and save them on tape or disk. -tony