The Easy Roll and Slow Burn of Cassette-Based Software | Internet Archive Blogs
But nestled in a relatively short span of time is the era of cassette-based loading, where actual audio tapes could have data stored on them, and played back to load into computers. In terms of adoption, the cassette-based software period is marked by people entering it and almost immediately clawing their way out of it as soon as they can afford to.
My earliest computing memories are thoroughly in the floppy and hard drive era, so this was a fun read of what life was like just before this and how it connects to modern emulation.