Postage Stamps from Bhutan That Double as Playable Vinyl Records (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Postage Stamps from Bhutan That Double as Playable Vinyl Records (2015)

openculture.com

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Long before DVDs, CDs and diskettes in magazines were a thing we had playable records as attachments. They were not real vinyl, I guess, but out of flexible plastic. The ones I remember were about the size of a single but square and also just one-sided.

Ars Technica described these about two years ago in "Forgotten audio formats: The flexi disc."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/04/forgotten-audio-form...

I had one, in a "Bloom County" cartoon book[1]. It was a flexible black record the thickness of a thick sheet of paper. It even had a spot to place a coin because the black plastic was thin and slippery. It played pretty well though and had two sides.

Someone is selling one on amazon with a decent image.

edit: see the comment with the art article about "Flexi-disc"

[1]https://www.amazon.com/Billy-Boingers-Bootleg-Dalton/dp/5551...

As an interesting aside in the "alternative record formats", when as a child I had the "mickey ghost chasers" book. It came with a little hand held box, which you'd put over mini "records" imbeded in the books[2]. You 'd hit a button and it would play audio. The underside was like a weird mini-upsidedown record player

[2]http://www.thisoldtoy.com/l_fp_set/toy-pages/800-899/800-tal...

again the best images I found are on amazon (see the orange circles on the page.

https://www.amazon.com/Disneys-Ghost-Chasers-Fisher-Price-Ta...

I wonder if that Fisher-Price player is related at all to the Panapic which seems similar https://youtu.be/quF45LvBtwA

Wow, it seems very much similar. They way you line up the player. Even the underside stylus and the poor quality audio.

> I had one, in a "Bloom County" cartoon book ... Someone is selling one on amazon with a decent image.

Both sides of that record are available on YouTube:

Billy and The Boingers, "I'm A Boinger" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxHAElC2FBw

Billy and the Boingers, U Stink But I (Heart) U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubgwVwK0SPg

Apart from flexi discs, the strangest example of a record I came across was Action Man figures in the late 60s and early 70s. They were a UK licence of GI Joe.

There were a few sets with added sound from 1" or 1.5" plastic, double sided records: https://www.vectis.co.uk/palitoy-vintage-action-man-boxed-fi...

One of the examples of Flexi disc.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/160305-songs-of-...

Bandai tried introducing a new format in 2004 oddly enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW7XLBrBByA

The 1962 Seattle World's Fair had postcards that were playable on record players. Some of them are still sold today, I was gifted one a few years back.

https://mcphee.com/products/seattle-worlds-fair-postcard-rec...

Software was also distributed this way ion some magazines back in the day when cassette tape was used as a data storage medium.

My favourite method for distributing software was hapening during 80s on Czechoslovak television, there was some tech/computer show and at the end, during credits they play sound that when you record it (and was lucky) you’ve got some small game or something.

If anyone wants to know whether you need a miniature record player for these, a Google image search gives a better idea of scale:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bhutan+record+stamps

Passable sound quality! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVVhzO2Rst8

For a bit more background, there's a longer article about these at https://thevinylfactory.com/features/the-curious-tale-of-bhu...

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