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Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

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Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#41

Post by pixl97 »

yesturi wrote: post #23

Today, 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 pro…

>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.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#43

Post by lucideer »

One 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.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#44

Post by embedding-shape »

mariusor wrote: post #40
embedding-shape wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In most builds mpv has yt-dlp integrated, you can directly pass the URL to it.

Ay, but then I don't get to teach beginners about the unix principle and how easy it is to pipe stuff between different tools :)

Thanks for the heads up regardless, I'm sure there was others who didn't know, who learned something new! :)

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#45

Post by yesturi »

afandian wrote: post #39
yesturi wrote: post #23

Today, 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 pro…

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.

Maybe 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.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#46

Post by yesturi »

mrweasel wrote: post #3

Old 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.

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.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#47

Post by hkpack »

afandian wrote: post #39
yesturi wrote: post #23

Today, 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 pro…

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.

Stepper motors were last used for HDDs with the capacity in megabytes.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#48

Post by colincooke »

yesturi wrote: post #23

Today, 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 pro…

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

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#49

Post by JimDabell »

rwmj wrote: post #7

Nice little project. Back in day, magazines distributed software on flexidisc ( 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.

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.
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