Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

Post by mbork_pl » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 5:24 AM UTC

00N8 wrote: post #66

ekropotin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Could it be that the handful of people with computer access were well connected & well regarded, & the people running the radio broadcasts wanted to cater to them especially? I'd imagine there could be some sense of personal & national pride & prestige around supporting these emerging technologies & promoting them to the public. (I'm just guessing though - I wasn't there & haven't studied the topic in depth.)

Post by userbinator » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 5:33 AM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #82

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.

There was a hacked driver you could get that would tighten up the tolerances of the stepper motor and get from 1.5 to 1.9 MB of data onto a single floppy, but sliding the tracks closer together. There was I believe at some point a game that shipped 1.5MB disks as a copy protection mechanism. But if you had this tool you could copy them anyway.

Post by medstrom » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 10:23 AM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #78

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 slac…

Post by bayindirh » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 11:24 AM UTC

hedgehog wrote: post #105

bayindirh wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by romforth » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 4:02 PM UTC

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.