On the CeBIT last year they had an exhibition of old computers. There was one, I think it was a Commodore C64, which had only BASIC as ui, programming language. You had to use those old audio tapes for saving your data. It is hard to think that someone wrote programs on such a "computer". I wonder what people of my age will say in 30 years when they see a box similar to the ones we are using in a museum.It's hard to think that someone like me actually wrote some very large programs in C64-Basic, and got paid for the "pleasure" :-)
Data saved via the audio channel was uncompressed - there was a floppy disk drive available, but that was pretty slow too. Eventually some bright spark came up with a data compression routine that worked for the audio channel, and all of a sudden it was faster to use cassette tape than a floppy disk. Go figure :-)
The C64 was generally programmed directly in machine code, for efficiency. BASIC was fine for non time-sensitive tasks, but games needed speed. And the C64 had separate chips for specialist tasks, like the SID sound chip and VIC-II for graphics (not to be confused with the Vic-20, another Commodore computer). The VIC chip handled graphics in units of "sprites" - you defined your graphic item, and gave it a path to move on, and then the CPU could forget about it, the VIC would keep it moving across the display. Compare that philosophy with current video cards competing on the strengths of their 3d processing gpu's :-) The SID chip produced multichannel sound, similar to MIDI stuff today, and some very talented musicians spent a lot of time on that platform.
Have a squiz at Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
-jim
