Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

That is ridiculously fantastic idea!

Shame I used to have an SCSI scanner but I already disassembled it for parts.

One can write a simple bootloader, which reads bytes printed on a paper sheet to memory then boots it. Something like: black (0), white (1) or long rectangle (1), short rectangle (0). Wonder about the storage capacity of the A4 paper.

This one boots from the parallel port: https://github.com/climatex/BootLPT (more details here https://boginjr.com/it/sw/dev/bootlpt-86/)

Forth it up on a middle aged PowerPC Mac!

Even older scanners were raw ISA piped over a centronix cable

Someone needs to give this a go!

Fantastic IDEA seconded!

OCR? Just have it read out binary. Then it can boot by looking at a punchcard.... or a lot of them.

[dead]

I remember getting floppy disks in magazines, I've used cassette tapes with a Commodore 64, I also remember flexidiscs for music, but I've never heard of the flexidisc as a software medium. Where was this?

I found a reference to a Thompson Twins game distributed by flexidisc in the UK.

Yes, I had an Acorn Electron (a BBC Micro-compatible), and the software came on audio cassettes and were sometimes taped to the front of computer magazines to share software demos. It was basically a modem that wasn’t hooked up to a telephone. If the tape was getting worn out, you occasionally had to fix it by putting a pencil in one of the gears and winding it a bit tighter. You could copy software with any dual tape deck designed for music.

Cool. I remember getting one such disc in a music magazine in the 80s. It occured to me then that you could maybe put software on it, but I never saw this implemented.

The first time I installed Slackware I didn’t have enough spare floppies to get the whole thing, I had to delete some things to do so, and then copying it in the computer lab lead to several dead disks. The installer didn’t yet have a retry feature so every time a disk turned out to be bad I had to make a new copy and start at the beginning. And sometimes that disk would be bad too. So the first time I installed slack I really installed it ten times.

Do not recommend.

> Back then, the storage is was much more 'real': it was slow, made noises, degraded noticeably because of stray magnetic fields etc, complicated mechanical parts. By the hearing alone, you may spot problems.

And it also could involve manual manipulation of things holding the data.

I may not have ever worked with lots of switches or cards or big reel-to-reels, but for our family’s first computer we had a Radio Shack cassette player that I could hook to it to load software. It was an ordeal to put in a tape, rewind if necessary and coordinate pressing play on the cassette tape player with the load command I had to enter in to load a program. Those were the days!

I could also record and load my own programs from the tapes. Press the record and play buttons at the same time and hit enter on that keyboard!

Granted our first computer also had cartridges, but I only had a few for it.

It was like Christmas (or literally was Christmas) whenever we got new software from anywhere, whether it was from Radio Shack or a bookstore that had a few or more tapes available.

That’s why I started to program. It was fun, and it was the only way to get new software whenever I wanted it. Early on it was entering programs from the manual, but I learned quickly to write my own.

When I later got a 5 1/4” floppy drive, it was so awesome, especially once I got an Apple and could trade/copy disks from others, stores, a local college, and the library.

Even once we got a modem, you still had put the data somewhere, so it went on floppies.

Everything was physical and novel then. It was so awesome.

> By the hearing alone, you may spot problems.

I still have PTSD from those Zip drives. You could hear your data disappearing into nothingness as you watched powerless the drive hacking away at your cartridge.

I’ve been working on archiving a bunch of old hard drives and floppies that my parents found and gave to me when they were cleaning out their garage.

Aside from the fun of seeing all of the old contents of the drives, it’s also been fun to walk through the progression of storage devices through the years. Lots of cool sounds and form factors, including an early Conner hard drive (that I have unfortunately been unable to archive), which is built like a tank and makes some great noises as it spins up and seeks.

Also cool to learn a little more about how the various storage media worked. It all feels very simple when you abstract it all away into bytes and blocks, but there was some wild engineering in those things. If you stop to look back, it’s impressive that we’ve made it this far.

I knew my PC was booting normally by the sound of the floppy drives.

Oh man, this reminds me of my "party trick" back in the day of saying I could tell what OS a computer was running by listening to the HDD seeking. The good old days

>By the hearing alone, you may spot problems.

Yep, was pretty easy to realize when you may have a bad sector on a floppy.

Even hard drives were more than loud enough you could tell when fragmentation was getting bad or the disk was starting to act suspect.

In the computer labs at university we taped a sign over one machine to warn people that its floppy drive would reliably destroy disks.

And yet was an absolute marvel of engineering. I often used to wonder at the accuracy and reliability they got out of those stepper motors, trying to imagine the size of the tracks.

Fun thought experiment. The 128 GB SD card on my desk could store a 1-bit bitmap of 1,000,000 x 1,000,000 pixels. Imagine shrinking that down to the size of the die, and how small each (logical) cell is.

In the Netherlands they used to broadcast software as part of the Hobbyscoop radio show. It was generic BASIC code that could run on a variety of home computers, requiring a small loader program for conversion. The project was named BASICODE[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE

Back in 1980's the Finnish public broadcaster YLE used to broadcast Commodore 64 software in their radio show Silikoni. They actually have a recording the first such episode available online at https://yle.fi/a/20-108142 - of course, this is in Finnish.

It was not a very reliable method but it did work if you had good FM reception and a high quality tape deck. I guess it helps that the data rate is only 300 bits per second or so.

Here's the ZX Spectrum version: https://www.racunalniski-muzej.si/en/40-years-later-a-game-f...

In Poland, in the communist period, the national broadcaster used to do it. For Atari, ZX Spectrum, Commmodore 64.

Haven't heard the audition, though. Well before my era.

I still have some old Amiga backups on VHS. Worked too… :)

Simply Amazing. I'd love to know more about this.

Engraving data on a titanium record would be a way to store it for many years even with exceptionally poor environmental conditions (fire, flood, locusts, plagues, what have you).

It's not such a huge step from an optical jukebox to a vinyl one :)

I can totally see it working.

For your amusement: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-19-me-10336-...

    Penn [Jillette] said "If not for Randi there would not be Penn & Teller as we are today."

Early Hip Hop DJs used this exact property to go straight to the drum break and not waste time waiting for it.

Probably because they got rid of it when the XT came out, so it was only there for (a few months under) 2 years. But it was a good trade; removing the cassette port gave enough area on the PCB for 3 more ISA slots.

It's funny how close an early PC was to the 8-bit machines: you had BASIC in ROM and a cassette interface.

You could even use a TV!

Way, way back when, you were lucky to get a serial port built in to the motherboard. everything was an add-in card. But you did get a tape drive interface. It was just an audio jack you plugged into any cassette player. You had to start and stop the tape yourself, of course.

Those aren't rare on 16-bit or less, '80s and before, pre-MS-DOS home computers. Looks cool, but apparently it was way too slow and painful to be fondly remembered.

They're fairly expensive, but on-demand vinyl is easy to get made.

That’s a DVD. You monster.

I've started doing:

    yt-dlp https://youtu.be/bqz65_YfcJg -o - | mpv -

And never been happier. I hope it still counts as a view for the channel/owner though, but never investigated if that's actually the case.

You mean, in case you only accept google cookies?

Youtube has stopped working with privacy plugins on...

Youtube has tonnes of cookies! Why give youtube a free pass but not some independent hobbyist's site?

I never got any cookie prompts for this site so I guess these did not make it past the content filters which keep cdn-cookieyes.com at bay. No cookies, no problem.

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