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Booting from a vinyl record (2020)
- pjmlp 8mo agoSure, because why not! Cool idea.
- guerrilla 8mo agoOkay, that is very cool. I love how doable it is too if you can get hands on the media that is.
- richrichardsson 8mo agoThey're fairly expensive, but on-demand vinyl is easy to get made.
- mrweasel 8mo agoOld scanners were SCSI, which made me wonder if you could use them as boot devices, if you could stuff the scanner driver and OCR software into the BIOS. Might be easier now that we have uEFI.
- hackomorespacko 8mo ago[dead]
- dang 8mo agoThanks, I've taken the liberty of fixing the typo. (GP used to say "old scanners where SCSI")
- estimator7292 8mo agoEven older scanners were raw ISA piped over a centronix cable
- bobmcnamara 8mo agoForth it up on a middle aged PowerPC Mac!
- yesturi 8mo agoThat 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.
- ddingus 8mo agoUse some finer pitch graph paper and people could author "boot sector code" by literally coloring in the little squares with the necessary bits! Would be sort of like paper tape.
- nxobject 8mo agoPepperidge Farm remembers when high-school computing classes used Scantron-style optical mark cards... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HP_Educational_Basic_optical_mark-reader_card._Godfrey_Manning..jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HP_Educational_Basic...
- ddingus 8mo agoCool! My school used a variation of these for a while. scantron... a name rising from the mists of time, lol
- ddingus 8mo agoSomeone needs to give this a go! Fantastic IDEA seconded!
- sandworm101 8mo agoOCR? Just have it read out binary. Then it can boot by looking at a punchcard.... or a lot of them.
- romforth 8mo agoThis one boots from the parallel port: https://github.com/climatex/BootLPT https://github.com/climatex/BootLPT (more details here https://boginjr.com/it/sw/dev/bootlpt-86/ https://boginjr.com/it/sw/dev/bootlpt-86/)
- burnt-resistor 8mo agoNot all old scanners were just SCSI; there parallel port and proprietary adapter card scanners too. Some cameras and printers also had SCSI interfaces: Opex MPS-40 mail sorting camera and NeXT Color Ink Jet SCSI. And don't forget SCSI network adapters (NICs). I'm wondering if there were a SCSI mouse and/or a SCSI to RS-232 adapter.
- netsharc 8mo agoThe video from the article, in case you don't want to accept cookies: https://youtu.be/bqz65_YfcJg https://youtu.be/bqz65_YfcJg It doesn't even say which type of cookies have to be accepted, I tried selecting just functional cookies, that didn't work. Funny how it's an arcane bunch of toggles in a cookie popup, on a page describing an arcane way of booting up a system.
- hagbard_c 8mo agoI 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.
- embedding-shape 8mo agoI'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.
- rwmj 8mo agoNice little project. Back in day, magazines distributed software on flexidisc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc) I remember it being very unreliable. The magazine instructed you to copy the flexidisc to a cassette tape first as you could only usually play the disc one or two times.
- forinti 8mo agoCool. 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.
- JimDabell 8mo agoYes, 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.
- bpoyner 8mo agoI 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.
- jnellis 8mo agoThey would come in computer mags. Byte, Compute, Creative Computing. Hobbyist magazines. You had to record them to your cassette drive first.
- jackmarshl0w 8mo agoGood alternative for recent storage shortage
- p0w3n3d 8mo agoIn my country they used to broadcast software for Atari 800 over radio - and it worked...
- binaryturtle 8mo agoI still have some old Amiga backups on VHS. Worked too… :)
- ddingus 8mo agoNice! Hi-fi VHS audio, or using one of those encoders that would pack the data into pixels?
- binaryturtle 8mo agoPixels. You can watch it as video (some old-school animated "QR Code" type of stuff :) )
- yesturi 8mo agoIn 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.
- ekropotin 8mo agoIt’s crazy that you had access to these technologies during communist period. Growing up in USSR I didn’t know anyone who would own a PC up until early 90s.
- yesturi 8mo agoPC-s were only described in hobby magazines, like Bajtek or Młody Technik. Nobody had them, though, except maybe some institutions. The hobbyists used to own ZX Spectrum or Commondore 64, but even that was rare. I know one programmer in his 50s. He had an access to the ZX Spectrum in his primary school, but that was by effort of his local physics teacher.
- foobarian 8mo ago> built-in “cassette interface” of the PC (that was hardly ever used) Wait a minute, what?? How did I not know about this.
- alnwlsn 8mo agoProbably 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.
- forinti 8mo agoIt'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!
- ddingus 8mo agoI have made the mistake of calling the early PC 8-bit, lolol... Yes, it reminds me of an Apple ][ computer, with the major difference being the Apple had the video sub-system on board, and the PC locating that on a card. I often wonder how things might have played out had the Apple ][ computers used one slot for video... or, had IBM chose to do it the Apple way. Apple computers all sort of gravitated to the onvoard video despite a few cards being made. It was just enough, especially when the later models included 80 column text. I ran my first PC on a TV. Same as the Apple and Atari machines. Fun times.
- numpad0 8mo agoThose 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.
- estimator7292 8mo agoWay, 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.
- hackomorespacko 8mo ago[dead]
- thebruce87m 8mo agoTip: turn the volume all the way down before listening to the recording. I had an unsettling worry that I was being programmed when I listened to it - a bit like an alternative to the virus in Pluribus.
- yesturi 8mo agoToday, storage is so advanced that to the ordinary user it simply presents as some kind of non-leaky abstraction: small rectangular shape, no moving parts, stores blocks, retrieves blocks, low latency, high reliability. 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.
- afandian 8mo agoAnd 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.
- yesturi 8mo agoMaybe that's the charm of mechanical watches? Precise metal parts moving in harmony. You can entertain yourself with analyzing its workings by simply watching it (no pun intended). Precise, but featureless digital clocks lack "soul" which you can actually see.
- ddingus 8mo agoFor sure. And early specimens are worth a close look if you ever get an opportunity! Humans can do amazing things! One of those things happens to be really precise, tiny parts literally willed into existing.
- hkpack 8mo agoStepper motors were last used for HDDs with the capacity in megabytes.
- afandian 8mo agoI was thinking 5¼ floppies actually. But the same applies to the voice coils in newer hdds.
- beardsciences 8mo agoappears to be hugged to death for now.
- dana321 8mo agoNaughty Naughty Bad Gateway!
- RK07 8mo agoShould have used his record cutter first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt6KMvkRM44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt6KMvkRM44
- hinkley 8mo agoThat’s a DVD. You monster.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- dylan604 8mo agoAs someone that's spent time behind the decks, I wonder what kind of hacking could be done by letting someone like Qbert take the wheel while loading. Part of the infamous sound of a dial-up connection being established was negotiating the speed of the connection. Now I'm thinking if you'd need a negotiation of 33 1/3, 45, or 78 as an advanced feature.
- lucideer 8mo agoOne of the most "real" features of vinyl records that I never really internalised until I started buying a few is that you can take a record out of its sleeve & look at the grooves to see how many tracks is on each side & how long each of the tracks is. You can also "skip" to tracks when playing (much better than tapes ever could) using this same method.
- clucas 8mo agoFor your amusement: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-19-me-10336-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-19-me-10336-...
- quickthrowman 8mo agoThanks for sharing, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything involving James Randi testing someone’s ability and actually verifying their claim, nice to see that not everyone is a bullshit artist!
- hinkley 8mo agoOh I wasn’t misremembering that. Penn [Jillette] said "If not for Randi there would not be Penn & Teller as we are today."
- nesarkvechnep 8mo agoEarly Hip Hop DJs used this exact property to go straight to the drum break and not waste time waiting for it.
- idontwantthis 8mo agoHow did he cut the record?
- LastTrain 8mo agoOne of the favorite records in my collection is the 8-Bit Construction Set 12" - chiptune + bootable Atari and C64 on the runouts. https://www.discogs.com/master/321455-8-Bit-Construction-Set-The-8-Bit-Construction-Set https://www.discogs.com/master/321455-8-Bit-Construction-Set...
- comprev 8mo agoThe physical aspect is what I most enjoy while DJing with vinyl. While I do have a full "digital" DJ setup to nothing beats (no pun intended) the satisfaction of mixing the black circular slabs with no crutches available in the digital world. Every mistake and imperfection of the groove is there for the listener to hear, with little room for error.
- Twirrim 8mo agoOver a decade ago I was working for AWS on Glacier, we jokingly pitched an April fools day article about how Glacier stores customer data on vinyl records, and that 9 out of 10 customers preferred the feel of their data when restored. AWS doesn't (or didn't) do April Fools day bits, so it didn't go anywhere, but the idea did amuse us in the team for a bit.
- jacquesm 8mo agoIt's not such a huge step from an optical jukebox to a vinyl one :) I can totally see it working.
- hinkley 8mo agoOkay turning a jukebox into a drive carousel would be a pretty cool mod.
- hedgehog 8mo agoEngraving 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).
- kccqzy 8mo agoYes. And it doesn’t have to be titanium per se. Cerabyte is trying to use ceramic. Even rocks might be good enough.
- bayindirh 8mo agoM-DISC [0] will probably cover most of the scenarios. It's still expensive, though. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
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- hinkley 8mo agoThe first program I ever started on one day and finished on another was saved onto an audio cassette. And I thought that was pretty weird. But like the vinyl it has really terrible random access behavior. It would be sorta cool if someone used an auto repeat record and several copies in order to do a multi track streaming solution. With six players you can load the file in 1:02 instead of 6:10. Or perhaps 1:33 average if you don’t assume the record begins right when you’re ready to read and you have to wait ~31s average seek time.
- buildsjets 8mo agoYou can boot Apple ][ software by connecting your old machine to the audio jack on your cell phone (might need a dongle these days) and streaming from websites like https://asciiexpress.net/gameserver/ https://asciiexpress.net/gameserver/ . I imagine vinyl would work was well, but I don't have a lathe to cut my own vinyl records. If you feel like throwing a hundred bucks at it for chuckles, you could have one made at https://intheclouds.io/ https://intheclouds.io/
- dang 8mo agoDiscussed at the time: Booting from a vinyl record - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25177045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25177045 - Nov 2020 (157 comments)
- pocksuppet 8mo ago[dead]
- knotsies 8mo agothis probably isn't compatible with uefi or secure boot, huh? just by eye it looks more compatible with systems expecting a master boot record. :^)
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- drweevil 8mo agoI used to have a cassette storage device for my Atari 800. This is totally geeky and awesome!