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Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

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Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#51

Post by afandian »

hkpack wrote: post #47
afandian wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was thinking 5¼ floppies actually. But the same applies to the voice coils in newer hdds.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#52

Post by kergonath »

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.

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.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#54

Post by yesturi »

ekropotin wrote: post #38
yesturi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’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.

PC-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.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#55

Post by VTimofeenko »

colincooke wrote: post #48
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

You can't just drop this without examples. What OSes and what were their tells?

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#56

Post by Lutzb »

kergonath wrote: post #52
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. 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.

Same with QiC80 drives. You could hear when the drive failed to read data.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#57

Post by ekropotin »

yesturi wrote: post #54
ekropotin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’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.

PC-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.

Yeh, that’s pretty much aligns with what I remember.

But I don’t get it then - why would they broadcast software for devices no one had?

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#58

Post by casets »

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…

> 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.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#59

Post by numpad0 »

VTimofeenko wrote: post #55
colincooke wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can't just drop this without examples. What OSes and what were their tells?

It's not something that can be easily written out in text form. More like a pronounced version of how an iPhone feels when you're force rebooting.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#60

Post by VTimofeenko »

numpad0 wrote: post #59
VTimofeenko wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just drop this without examples. What OSes and what were their tells?

It's not something that can be easily written out in text form. More like a pronounced version of how an iPhone feels when you're force rebooting.

Not an iPhone person, however when I force shutdown a laptop I am hacking away on, I do feel like I am strangling it with a pillow to ease it's suffering. But that feeling comes purely from my side, the machine shows no signs of life at that point anyway.

Are you referring to something like the GPRS staccato coming from speakers catching a cell phone call or the almost imperceptible flyback whine of a CRT?

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