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Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

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Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#91

Post by ddingus »

yesturi wrote: post #45
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.

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.

For sure. And early specimens are worth a close look if you ever get an opportunity!

Humans can do amazing things! One of those things happens to be really precise, tiny parts literally willed into existing.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#92

Post by ddingus »

binaryturtle wrote: post #21
p0w3n3d wrote: post #9

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

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?

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#94

Post by ddingus »

yesturi wrote: post #46
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.

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.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#95

Post by mikepurvis »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #86
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).

Nasa preferred gold (more specifically copper plated with nickel and then plated with gold) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

To be fair, that's not simply an archival disc, but also something explicitly intended to be readable by intelligent life elsewhere in space. The encoding of data was optimized for simplicity above all else.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#96

Post by ddingus »

forinti wrote: post #20
foobarian wrote: post #14

> built-in “cassette interface” of the PC (that was hardly ever used) Wait a minute, what?? How did I not know about this.

It's funny how close an early PC was to the 8-bit machines: you had BASIC in ROM and a cassette interface. You could even use a TV!

I have made the mistake of calling the early PC 8-bit, lolol...

Yes, it reminds me of an Apple ][ computer, with the major difference being the Apple had the video sub-system on board, and the PC locating that on a card.

I often wonder how things might have played out had the Apple ][ computers used one slot for video... or, had IBM chose to do it the Apple way.

Apple computers all sort of gravitated to the onvoard video despite a few cards being made. It was just enough, especially when the later models included 80 column text.

I ran my first PC on a TV. Same as the Apple and Atari machines.

Fun times.

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#97

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

Re: Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

#100

Post by dang »

hackomorespacko wrote: post #13
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.

[dead]

Thanks, I've taken the liberty of fixing the typo. (GP used to say "old scanners where SCSI")
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