Booting from a vinyl record (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

boginjr.com

357 pointsyesturi119 comments

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.

Even older scanners were raw ISA piped over a centronix cable

Forth it up on a middle aged PowerPC Mac!

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...

Cool! My school used a variation of these for a while.

scantron... a name rising from the mists of time, lol

Someone needs to give this a go!

Fantastic IDEA seconded!

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

This one boots from the parallel port: https://github.com/climatex/BootLPT (more details here https://boginjr.com/it/sw/dev/bootlpt-86/)

Not all old scanners were just SCSI; there parallel port and proprietary adapter card scanners too.

Some cameras and printers also had SCSI interfaces: Opex MPS-40 mail sorting camera and NeXT Color Ink Jet SCSI.

And don't forget SCSI network adapters (NICs).

I'm wondering if there were a SCSI mouse and/or a SCSI to RS-232 adapter.

Nice little project.

Back in day, magazines distributed software on flexidisc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc) I remember it being very unreliable. The magazine instructed you to copy the flexidisc to a cassette tape first as you could only usually play the disc one or two times.

Cool. I remember getting one such disc in a music magazine in the 80s. It occured to me then that you could maybe put software on it, but I never saw this implemented.

Yes, I had an Acorn Electron (a BBC Micro-compatible), and the software came on audio cassettes and were sometimes taped to the front of computer magazines to share software demos. It was basically a modem that wasn’t hooked up to a telephone. If the tape was getting worn out, you occasionally had to fix it by putting a pencil in one of the gears and winding it a bit tighter. You could copy software with any dual tape deck designed for music.

I remember getting floppy disks in magazines, I've used cassette tapes with a Commodore 64, I also remember flexidiscs for music, but I've never heard of the flexidisc as a software medium. Where was this?

I found a reference to a Thompson Twins game distributed by flexidisc in the UK.

They would come in computer mags. Byte, Compute, Creative Computing. Hobbyist magazines. You had to record them to your cassette drive first.

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?

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

In Poland, in the communist period, the national broadcaster used to do it. For Atari, ZX Spectrum, Commmodore 64.

Haven't heard the audition, though. Well before my era.

It’s crazy that you had access to these technologies during communist period.

Growing up in USSR I didn’t know anyone who would own a PC up until early 90s.

PC-s were only described in hobby magazines, like Bajtek or Młody Technik. Nobody had them, though, except maybe some institutions. The hobbyists used to own ZX Spectrum or Commondore 64, but even that was rare.

I know one programmer in his 50s. He had an access to the ZX Spectrum in his primary school, but that was by effort of his local physics teacher.

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.)

My guess would be that the broadcaster had one geek who pushed for that. Fellow geeks had software over the radio, the broadcaster had an opinion of a modern one, keeping up with the newest tech. Win-win.

I'm not (yet) in my 50s (though close). I used to have a C64 back in the day. I wrote write a few things in its horrible BASIC dialect. Probably the most advanced was a database (not relational, just one table, but kept separately from the source, of course on an audio cassette).

That device had ridiculous capabilities. The sound chip was good enough people wrote a speech synthesis software. Later, people wrote a graphical OS, with e.g. a text editor being an equivalent of Windows Write from the 90s.

Simply Amazing. I'd love to know more about this.

Here's a couple of articles:

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/04/people-once-downloaded...

https://interestingengineering.com/science/you-could-downloa...

In the Netherlands they used to broadcast software as part of the Hobbyscoop radio show. It was generic BASIC code that could run on a variety of home computers, requiring a small loader program for conversion. The project was named BASICODE[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE

Here's the ZX Spectrum version: https://www.racunalniski-muzej.si/en/40-years-later-a-game-f...

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.

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 problems.

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.

Stepper motors were last used for HDDs with the capacity in megabytes.

I was thinking 5¼ floppies actually. But the same applies to the voice coils in newer hdds.

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.

Are you referring to 2M/2MGUI? That didn't change the track spacing (which is fixed) but used bigger sector sizes (similar to how HDDs went from 512B to 4K physical sectors):

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27412/how...

(Big fuckings to Wikipedia for erasing history, and kudos to archive.org for preserving it: https://web.archive.org/web/20241203124243/https://en.wikipe... )

No they definitely did more tracks, but it seems to be a smaller multiplier than I recalled.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12768/wha...

2-5% more tracks, 12.5% more sectors.

The track spacing didn't change, but yes, many if not all floppy drives could step the head slightly past the officially supported number of tracks.

>By the hearing alone, you may spot problems.

Yep, was pretty easy to realize when you may have a bad sector on a floppy.

Even hard drives were more than loud enough you could tell when fragmentation was getting bad or the disk was starting to act suspect.

Brzzzzt, tuk tuk tuk tuk brzzzt brzzzt tuk brzzzzt brzzzt

I/O Error :(

You listen to the initial slamming of the head to zero align it, then those happy little tuk, tuk sounds.

It all good, until it isn't!

Oh man, this reminds me of my "party trick" back in the day of saying I could tell what OS a computer was running by listening to the HDD seeking. The good old days

You can't just drop this without examples. What OSes and what were their tells?

It's not something that can be easily written out in text form. More like a pronounced version of how an iPhone feels when you're force rebooting.

Not an iPhone person, however when I force shutdown a laptop I am hacking away on, I do feel like I am strangling it with a pillow to ease it's suffering. But that feeling comes purely from my side, the machine shows no signs of life at that point anyway.

Are you referring to something like the GPRS staccato coming from speakers catching a cell phone call or the almost imperceptible flyback whine of a CRT?

Not that poster but I can also tell the difference in sound between filesystems, likely due to how they store their metadata and the resulting seek patterns. This is my subjective experience:

Linux ext* series - mostly silent, but even periods of high disk usage tend to be on the quieter side - probably due to lots of caching

MacOS - continuous, low-pitched "gritty" sound

Windows FAT - periods of silence punctuated by occasional intermittent groans

Windows NTFS - low rhythmic grunting, more continuous than FAT

Windows 9x - rather quiet, although periods of heavy activity can produce quite high-pitched seeking sounds

> By the hearing alone, you may spot problems.

I still have PTSD from those Zip drives. You could hear your data disappearing into nothingness as you watched powerless the drive hacking away at your cartridge.

Same with QiC80 drives. You could hear when the drive failed to read data.

> 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 problems.

And it also could involve manual manipulation of things holding the data.

I may not have ever worked with lots of switches or cards or big reel-to-reels, but for our family’s first computer we had a Radio Shack cassette player that I could hook to it to load software. It was an ordeal to put in a tape, rewind if necessary and coordinate pressing play on the cassette tape player with the load command I had to enter in to load a program. Those were the days!

I could also record and load my own programs from the tapes. Press the record and play buttons at the same time and hit enter on that keyboard!

Granted our first computer also had cartridges, but I only had a few for it.

It was like Christmas (or literally was Christmas) whenever we got new software from anywhere, whether it was from Radio Shack or a bookstore that had a few or more tapes available.

That’s why I started to program. It was fun, and it was the only way to get new software whenever I wanted it. Early on it was entering programs from the manual, but I learned quickly to write my own.

When I later got a 5 1/4” floppy drive, it was so awesome, especially once I got an Apple and could trade/copy disks from others, stores, a local college, and the library.

Even once we got a modem, you still had put the data somewhere, so it went on floppies.

Everything was physical and novel then. It was so awesome.

Same feels here too. Cassette was kindnof magical and kind of crappy. Well, depending on your machine, potentially very crappy.

One of the better cassette loaders can be found in the 6809 based Tandy CoCo machines. When in the cassette times, I would stress test various machines.

My Atari was bog slow, reading a block at a time, with a pause between... And it was picky and really wanted the dedicated cassette drive. Not recommended at all..

Apples were pretty OK, along with the Tandy machines. The Tandy reader software, whoever wrote it, took full advantage of the nice CPU and 6 bit DAC. I could rest a finger on the tape, slowing it down, then listening to the wow, flutter and speed changes all over the place while the machine recovered. Almost always loaded correctly.

The Apples were not that robust, but worked well enough to not be a big bother.

Both Apple and Tandy machines had good commands for loading and saving right to regions of RAM.

On the Apple, with the spiffy Mini-assembler, it was possible to develop big programs a piece at a time, saving off stuff that worked.

Every so often, it made sense to read a bunch in and save off a nice chunk! Always felt good doing that.

Eventually, you load it all, patch it up, linker style, maybe moving bits around some, and then save it as a completed assembly program.

No source, just the data on the tape and what the mini-assembler would show you when you list memory.

Good times!

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.

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.

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.

Up until a few years ago my Slackware install was broken up over 4 flash drives, as Slackware grew I never bothered to buy a new flash drive big enough for it. It was a lot like the old floppy install. Eventually I realized I could just put all the packages on an external drive and greatly simplify things and then I snapped out of the old habit and just bought a few new flash drives.

That's not so dissimilar to my experience in 2025 with whatever USB drives I can scrounge up around the house!

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

One of the favorite records in my collection is the 8-Bit Construction Set 12" - chiptune + bootable Atari and C64 on the runouts.

https://www.discogs.com/master/321455-8-Bit-Construction-Set...

You can boot Apple ][ software by connecting your old machine to the audio jack on your cell phone (might need a dongle these days) and streaming from websites like https://asciiexpress.net/gameserver/ . I imagine vinyl would work was well, but I don't have a lathe to cut my own vinyl records. If you feel like throwing a hundred bucks at it for chuckles, you could have one made at https://intheclouds.io/

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, normally it's not expensive, but since market for these discs are so small here, the prices are at exorbitant levels for M-DVDs. M-BDRs were unavailable, but they are available for reasonable prices, as I just checked.

I have drives which can burn M-DVDs, but I'd need an M-BDR drive. The ones I have doesn't support M-DISCs.

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.

The physical aspect is what I most enjoy while DJing with vinyl.

While I do have a full "digital" DJ setup to nothing beats (no pun intended) the satisfaction of mixing the black circular slabs with no crutches available in the digital world.

Every mistake and imperfection of the groove is there for the listener to hear, with little room for error.

Tip: turn the volume all the way down before listening to the recording.

I had an unsettling worry that I was being programmed when I listened to it - a bit like an alternative to the virus in Pluribus.

> built-in “cassette interface” of the PC (that was hardly ever used)

Wait a minute, what?? How did I not know about this.

Probably because they got rid of it when the XT came out, so it was only there for (a few months under) 2 years. But it was a good trade; removing the cassette port gave enough area on the PCB for 3 more ISA slots.

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.

Those aren't rare on 16-bit or less, '80s and before, pre-MS-DOS home computers. Looks cool, but apparently it was way too slow and painful to be fondly remembered.

Way, way back when, you were lucky to get a serial port built in to the motherboard. everything was an add-in card. But you did get a tape drive interface. It was just an audio jack you plugged into any cassette player. You had to start and stop the tape yourself, of course.

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.

For your amusement: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-19-me-10336-...

Thanks for sharing, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything involving James Randi testing someone’s ability and actually verifying their claim, nice to see that not everyone is a bullshit artist!

Oh I wasn’t misremembering that.

    Penn [Jillette] said "If not for Randi there would not be Penn & Teller as we are today."

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

Discussed at the time:

Booting from a vinyl record - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25177045 - Nov 2020 (157 comments)

As someone that's spent time behind the decks, I wonder what kind of hacking could be done by letting someone like Qbert take the wheel while loading.

Part of the infamous sound of a dial-up connection being established was negotiating the speed of the connection. Now I'm thinking if you'd need a negotiation of 33 1/3, 45, or 78 as an advanced feature.

Okay, that is very cool. I love how doable it is too if you can get hands on the media that is.

They're fairly expensive, but on-demand vinyl is easy to get made.

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.

Should have used his record cutter first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt6KMvkRM44

That’s a DVD. You monster.

The video from the article, in case you don't want to accept cookies: https://youtu.be/bqz65_YfcJg

It doesn't even say which type of cookies have to be accepted, I tried selecting just functional cookies, that didn't work. Funny how it's an arcane bunch of toggles in a cookie popup, on a page describing an arcane way of booting up a system.

I never got any cookie prompts for this site so I guess these did not make it past the content filters which keep cdn-cookieyes.com at bay. No cookies, no problem.

I've started doing:

    yt-dlp https://youtu.be/bqz65_YfcJg -o - | mpv -

And never been happier. I hope it still counts as a view for the channel/owner though, but never investigated if that's actually the case.

Very unlikely, you need the browser for that

I would be very surprised if they didn't still have analytics tracking on the MPEG-DASH streams directly (what yt-dlp is downloading)

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.

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

What else could it mean? Aren't "views" something that matches with "watch"? Maybe I'm missing something from how YouTube works, not a big user, happy to be corrected :)

It could mean that it marks the video as watched but without increasing the view counter. There are multiple signals that youtube had as a view counter or measuring what parts of a video were watched. Just because youtube knows a video was watched it may not increase the view counter to avoid bots or just because.

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.

In most builds mpv has yt-dlp integrated, you can directly pass the URL to it.

Ay, but then I don't get to teach beginners about the unix principle and how easy it is to pipe stuff between different tools :)

Thanks for the heads up regardless, I'm sure there was others who didn't know, who learned something new! :)

> In most builds mpv has yt-dlp integrated, you can directly pass the URL to it.

Last time I was passing youtube URLs to mpv, it relied on having an executable named youtube-dl.exe somewhere visible to the mpv executable. To get it to work with yt-dlp, I had to copy and rename the yt-dlp executable.

> has yt-dlp integrated

Have they switched to supplying their own youtube downloader instead of just working with whatever you happen to have in your path?

Youtube has tonnes of cookies! Why give youtube a free pass but not some independent hobbyist's site?

It doesn't get a free pass from me but it seems to work fine with only first party cookies, ublock origin and built in tracking protection active, and most (but not all) third party content blocked by umatrix.

Alternatively you can use the link in GP to grab the video via yt-dlp. Can even do that via tor if you want. (Weirdly at least historically youtube was friendlier to tor exit nodes than it was to a lot of mainstream VPNs. Not sure what was up with that, haven't tested it in a while.)

You mean, in case you only accept google cookies?

Youtube has stopped working with privacy plugins on...

I used to have a cassette storage device for my Atari 800. This is totally geeky and awesome!

How did he cut the record?

Sure, because why not!

Cool idea.

appears to be hugged to death for now.

Naughty Naughty Bad Gateway!

this probably isn't compatible with uefi or secure boot, huh? just by eye it looks more compatible with systems expecting a

master boot

record. :^)

Good alternative for recent storage shortage

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