Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

Old scanners where 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.

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.

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.

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

How did he cut the record?

appears to be hugged to death for now.

Sure, because why not!

Cool idea.

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