Oh yeah, we had a tape drive for the old Atari 800. I rememeber the rainy afternoon whe we tried to listen to "Basic Programming Language" on the stereo and load "Hotel California" onto the Atari.
Not pleasant, but pretty funny.
Basically, a tape drive loaded the executable into memory; when you were done, you loaded something else. There were no hard drives back then, so no "permanent" memory in the Atari itself. Hilarious.
-Throbblefoot