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Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

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Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#101

Post by ttkari »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #9

In my country they used to broadcast software for Atari 800 over radio - and it worked...

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.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#102

Post by embedding-shape »

netsharc wrote: post #30
basilikum wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yt-dlp needs to get the stream from somewhere. It has to fetch the website for that and even execute a JavaScript challenge to retrieve the media endpoint.

I'd guess it skips running the JavaScript that reports to the Analytics backend...

I ended up trying to look it up and found this:

> Available options: [...] mark_watched: Mark videos watched (even with --simulate). Only for YouTube

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/c8680b65f79cfeb23b342b...

So I'm guessing without that, it doesn't, so would have to add the flag for it to try to count it as a view.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#104

Post by nxobject »

ddingus wrote: post #94
yesturi wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Use 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.

Pepperidge Farm remembers when high-school computing classes used Scantron-style optical mark cards...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HP_Educational_Basic...

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#105

Post by hedgehog »

bayindirh wrote: post #72
hedgehog wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd heard of those but never looked them up, always thought they'd be super expensive. It's about $40 for a drive that can write them and $13 each for 100GB media. That's pretty reasonable for durable storage.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#107

Post by binaryturtle »

ddingus wrote: post #92
binaryturtle wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nice! Hi-fi VHS audio, or using one of those encoders that would pack the data into pixels?

Pixels. You can watch it as video (some old-school animated "QR Code" type of stuff :) )

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#108

Post by mr_toad »

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…

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

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#109

Post by charcircuit »

embedding-shape wrote: post #102
netsharc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd guess it skips running the JavaScript that reports to the Analytics backend...

I ended up trying to look it up and found this: > Available options: [...] mark_watched: Mark videos watched (even with --simulate). Only for YouTube https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/c8680b65f79cfeb23b342b... So I'm guessing without that, it doesn't, so would have to add the flag for it to try to count it as a view.

I don't think that flag is related at all.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#110

Post by sandworm101 »

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.

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