Turbo Tape
Fast-loading routines that made the Commodore 64's cassette tapes bearable — several times quicker than stock.
The Commodore 64's Datasette was notoriously slow: the C64's KERNAL routine read only about 50 bytes a second, so a game could take over ten minutes to load. Turbo tape loaders rewrote how data was encoded on the tape and pushed the speed up several-fold — often five to ten times faster.
The technique became standard on commercial tapes; the loader sat at the front of the tape and then pulled in the rest at its own, faster pace. Many also doubled as copy protection through their peculiar encoding. On the disk side the fastloader did the same job for the 1541, and once D64 images took over online, tape disappeared for good.