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If you are part of the generation that loaded games from tapes (still common in the mid 80s), I salute you. In retrospect I have no idea how we endured loading times that long. Then again, this was well before everything turned into today’s instant-gratification society. The three-digit counter on the C64 Datasette was a mechanical tape counter. It tracked how far the cassette had wound so you could note the position of each program or file and later fast-forward or rewind to that spot instead of searching blindly through the whole tape. Tapes stored programs sequentially, with no directory or random access, so users wrote the counter numbers next to the titles on the cassette inlay. The C64’s built-in tape routines were quite slow, with around 60 bytes per second. A large game using only the standard loader could take 10-15 minutes, and a few early titles stretched even further toward 20+ minutes.