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Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

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Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#71

Post by kccqzy »

hedgehog wrote: post #70
Twirrim wrote: post #63

Over 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.

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).

Yes. And it doesn’t have to be titanium per se. Cerabyte is trying to use ceramic. Even rocks might be good enough.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#72

Post by bayindirh »

hedgehog wrote: post #70
Twirrim wrote: post #63

Over 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.

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).

M-DISC [0] will probably cover most of the scenarios. It's still expensive, though.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#73

Post by WalterBright »

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…

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

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#74

Post by ebergen »

WalterBright wrote: post #73
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…

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

I keep an optical drive in my desktop for the sound it makes when it boots.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#75

Post by el_benhameen »

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…

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.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#76

Post by direwolf20 »

estimator7292 wrote: post #37
0-_-0 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very unlikely, you need the browser for that

Good thing yt-dlp is a browser.

It's not. It runs enough JavaScript to pass the CAPTCCA (completely automated public turing test to tell computers and computers apart) challenge but it doesn't actually load the page and execute everything.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#77

Post by hinkley »

The 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.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#78

Post by hinkley »

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…

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.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#79

Post by hinkley »

jacquesm wrote: post #64
Twirrim wrote: post #63

Over 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.

It's not such a huge step from an optical jukebox to a vinyl one :) I can totally see it working.

Okay turning a jukebox into a drive carousel would be a pretty cool mod.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#80

Post by nesarkvechnep »

lucideer wrote: post #43

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.

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