Seinäjoki, Finland was a tough place to be a budding geek back in 1985. Just ask Eero Tunkelo, a grade school student with a doctor for a father, a mother who taught sewing and textile design, and a newfound love for computers and programming.

"Computers were new, so anything you did, it was—wow!" he told me during a recent phone call. Such was Tunkelo's passion for the technology that he spent an entire summer working so that he could purchase his own Commodore VIC-20—an early home-oriented machine that ran Commodore BASIC 2.0 and predated the more advanced Commodore 64.

With his VIC-20, Tunkelo taught himself BASIC, then studied assembly language. He wrote programs that ran "straight to the metal," as he put it, but also came from the heart. One included graphics that celebrated his sister's high school graduation. But the young innovator felt isolated. "Computers were not as popular as they are now," Tunkelo said, and few schools had one.

Then came a remarkable radio show that changed the landscape for him and a generation of Finnish technology lovers—a show that literally broadcast code over the airwaves.

The Micro Club

This work-in-progress was produced by the Finnish Broadcasting Company (known by its Finnish abbreviation, YLE), Finland's public media system. Educator Kai R. Lehtonen, who produced educational radio shows for Finnish schools, supervised the new show—although he disliked using the "e-word."

"My personal view was that if we advertised too much the 'educational' side we would be like the British redcoats in the American revolutionary war and that we should rather act as the American minutemen who took their adversary by surprise," Lehtonen told me in an e-mail interview. "The purpose should be to catch the audience because the programs were interesting and well made and not only because a teacher would order the kids to listen."

At the top of Lehtonen's priorities list was encouraging his listeners to explore computing, and he was captivated by early experiments in the Netherlands which involved streaming computer code over radio frequencies. The finer points of the technique went over his head—"I am neither too technically civilized a person nor a computing guru," he confessed—but the basic idea was clear enough.

"If you wrote a piece of code in a computer, saved it on a [Commodore] C-cassette, took that cassette out and listened to it with an ordinary cassette recorder you heard sounds," Lehtonen explained. "But as sounds could be copied to another tape and as sounds could be transmitted over radio, then why should it not be possible to receive even these sounds of the code, record them with a C-cassette recorder and have the recorded sounds do their trick in another computer?" In other words—why couldn't you distribute code by simply playing it over the radio while enthusiasts taped it for later use?

For their experiments, the Dutch had developed their own BASICODE language variant, but Lehtonen chose to use regular BASIC code "to make things simpler." YLE experimented cautiously with the idea through the early 1980s. Early attempts took place on "Kansan mikrokerho," a YLE show about computers whose title loosely translates from Finnish into "Everybody's micro club."

Encouraged by a series of rough tries, Lehtonen and his team decided to go for the gold on August 21, 1985 with a short bit of code broadcast as part of YLE's "Radio Rex" technology magazine. The script calculated how many years, months, and days elapsed between two dates supplied by the user. The hosts asked their computer-equipped listeners to turn their devices on and to record what they came to call the "buzzing."

Then the buzzing began—and lasted for 33 seconds. Here is the script as it streamed:

10 REM "HOW MUCH TIME HAS ELAPSED", BY KRL 1.5.1985

20 REM IN THE DATES A=EARLIER (YEAR, MONTH, DAY), M=LATER

30 CLR

40 PRINT "HOW MUCH TIME HAS ELAPSED?"

50 PRINT

60 PRINT

70 REM THE LATER DATE

80 INPUT "WRITE THE LATER YEAR ";MVUOSI

90 INPUT "WRITE THE LATER MONTH ";MKK

100 INPUT "WRITE THE LATER DAY ";MPV

110 REM THE EARLIER DATE

120 PRINT

130 INPUT "WRITE THE EARLIER YEAR ";AVUOSI

140 INPUT "WRITE THE EARLIER MONTH ";AKK

150 INPUT "WRITE THE EARLIER DAY ";APV

160 FOR DL=1 TO 500:NEXT DL

170 PRINT

180 PRINT

190 PRINT MVUOSI" - "MKK" - "MPV

200 PRINT AVUOSI" - "AKK" - "APV

210 PRINT

220 REM DATES ARE COMPARED AND CALCULATIONS MADE: DAYS, MONTHS, YEARS

230 FOR DL=1 TO 500: NEXT DL

240 IF MPV>APV THEN TPV=MPV-APV

250 IF MPV>APV THEN TKK=MKK-AKK

260 IF MPV<APV THEN TPV=(MPV+30)-APV

270 IF MPV<APV THEN MKK=MKK-1

280 IF MKK=>AKK THEN TKK=MKK-AKK

290 IF MKK<AKK THEN TKK=(MKK+12)-AKK

300 IF MKK>=AKK THEN TUV=MVUOSI-AVUOSI

310 IF MKK<AKK THEN TUV=(MVUOSI-1)-AVUOSI

320 REM THE RESULT IS DISPLAYED

330 PRINT

340 PRINT "THE RESULT OF THE CALCULATION IS: "

350 PRINT TUV" - "TKK" - "TPV

360 END

Following this half minute long stream, the show's staff nervously asked listeners to let them know whether the code actually delivered its expected results. "According to the received feedback the programme had worked in all parts of the country with no problems," a report about the experiment noted.

Lehtonen was delighted. "The proof of the pudding is in eating," he said. "The code part did not get any special treatment as for us. It was just a bit of sounds just like the speech or music. And hey, presto!—this worked as expected and we received positive feedback from all over Finland, the most faraway report coming from Keminmaa, about 600 km north from Helsinki."

Riding a silicon horse

Emboldened, the producers soon challenged their fans to make the code more sophisticated—to, for example, add a subroutine so that the program would not accept "February 30" as input—then submit their new versions to the network on cassettes.

Not only did versions of these BASIC programs get snailmailed into YLE's offices, but listeners quickly submitted entirely new code of their own. Eero Tunkelo sent in that program he wrote for his sister, which was eventually "buzzed" over the airwaves.

Lehtonen decided that it was time to make the code transmissions a fortnightly event, with each episode titled "Silikoni."

"The name is a Finnish pun that does not translate," the report on the broadcasts continued. "The base is, of course silicon, the raw material of the computer chips. But spelled with a 'k' instead of a 'c' it becomes a Finnish word that can be understood to mean a silicon horse. You see, in the Ancient times, a poet rode the winged horse Pegasus and wrote with a feather taken from its wing. Now a poet would naturally use a computer and a word processor, thus riding a silicon horse."

Producers gave out small prizes to participants, including T-shirts and bags with Silikoni logos. The show also distributed posters that youngsters could hang on their bedroom doors. "Please do not disturb!" one read. "I am just listening to the Silikoni!"

For the young Tunkelo, Silikoni was a revelation, a show that taught him he wasn't alone. "I now felt like I was part of something," he said.