from Hacker News

Booting from a vinyl record

by ruik on 11/22/20, 12:51 PM with 157 comments

  • by aetherson on 11/22/20, 7:05 PM

    When I was a CS major in the 90's, one of my professors told me a story of his own college days, with punch-card computers.

    His university bought a tape reader (like, punched paper tape, not magnetic tape) to do the boot code of the computer, on the theory that tape was a little easier to manage than punch-cards for the boot (you can't lose one of the cards, or get them out of order, etc with tape). So my prof and some of his friends start playing with the tape reader, and they realize that what controls the IO speed of the tape is actually the tensile strength of the tape -- if the feeder tries to put too much force on it, it will tear the paper tape. The actual computer can read the instructions much faster than the tape can physically handle.

    So they got some plastic tape instead, and punched the boot code in the (much stronger) plastic tape. Then, to boot the computer, they'd feed the plastic tape through the part of the reader that actually read, bypassing the mechanical part that pulled and wound the tape, and then manually grab the other end and yank on it as hard as they could, basically starting the computer like it was one of those old lawnmowers that you pulled the cord to turn over the engine.

  • by K0balt on 11/22/20, 3:47 PM

    Sometimes we use our phones (often no signal in the field) to send photos back to the office over mobile radio using the robot36 protocol. You just load up an image, it plays a modem sound, and the receiving station has it on loudspeaker, with another phone listening. It works remarkably well as long as the sending / receiving environment is relatively quiet.

    I even had a telegram chat with my kids where we would share memes back and forth as wave files. We called it 56k meme chat lol.

  • by aidos on 11/22/20, 1:21 PM

    Love it.

    When I was younger we had an Amstrad (CPC6128) that had a disk drive, but not a tape drive. My cousins had travelled to the UK where they picked up lots of games, but unfortunately most were on cassette. Being desperate to enjoy the wonderful new worlds contained within, I had to come up with a solution. In my case, I cracked open my sisters ghetto blaster and wired it in to the port on the side of the Machine. Worked like a charm, and I too got to enjoy the gruelling wait on every game change.

  • by lebuffon on 11/22/20, 3:04 PM

    The need to raise the BASS and reduce the Treble makes me think that the setup was missing the RIAA equalizer. If the AMP did not have a "phono" input that would be the case.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

  • by lb1lf on 11/22/20, 1:19 PM

    "We choose to go to the Moon...We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; (...)"

    This blog post made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside -really- it encapsulates all curiosity, hacking spirit and adventure is all about.

  • by ajnin on 11/22/20, 7:51 PM

    Some computer magazines of the 80's actually included so called "Floppy ROMs", actually thin vinyl records, in the magazine pages ! : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Age

  • by Netcob on 11/23/20, 11:37 AM

    When you boot your OS like that, it will actually have a warmer and more authentic quality when you're using it.

  • by lisper on 11/22/20, 5:30 PM

    Very cool, but where did the record come from? Was bootable vinyl ever actually a thing? I'm old enough to remember the cassette era and I never saw bootable vinyl before today. Or did they somehow do a custom press from an audio recording?

  • by joecarpenter on 11/23/20, 2:51 AM

    Ah, the memories! Around the fall of the Soviet Union, there was an IBM-compatible clone called Poisk. It was not 100% compatible with with IBM PC, had 128 KB built-in RAM (extensible to 640 KB with a card), had CGA graphics with a composite output only, no floppy interface without an addon, etc. But it was cheap, like really cheap and only needed a TV and a tape recorder to get going. I'd say Poisk was #2 home PC after gazillion of inexpensive ZX Spectrum clones.

    Article mentions that tape interface was rarely used - that was definitely not the case in the (ex)USSR.

    Anyway, having spent so much time with Poisk with cassette interface after ZX Spectrum, I can still distinguish PC vs ZX tapes by just listening to them - they have slightly different tonality.

  • by jonplackett on 11/22/20, 1:09 PM

    This is the most ‘Hacker News’ title I have ever seen

  • by ArtWomb on 11/22/20, 1:59 PM

    Love it. Conceptually identical to the old TRS-80 cassette tape interface. And even preserves the sensitivity to sound artifacts. Am beginning to think DOS will rise again. FreeDOS graphics mode is just as much fun to play with as PICO-8. 256 colors, 320 x 200 resolution. With modern techniques like AI Upscaling, and DOSBox emulation in browser. It doesn't seem too far fetched to say this is a viable development platform even in 2020 ;)

  • by qwertox on 11/22/20, 2:48 PM

    Next step is to get Doom running from the B-Side?

  • by bhickey on 11/22/20, 2:01 PM

    Rejecting cookies and going to about:blank. That's a great design decision.

  • by excalibur on 11/22/20, 2:42 PM

    This post glosses over the whole "getting the data onto the record" process, which may not be the novel bit here but is definitely interesting as a reader.

  • by protomyth on 11/22/20, 5:47 PM

    I remember my old Atari 400 loaded programs using the 410 cassette recorder. I do wonder how much a record could hold compared to a cassette, and given just wear, which would last longer?

    Also, didn't some magazine from the era ship a plastic record for some system? I vaguely remember it, but I could just be imagining things. It was actually square with the 45 size record printed in it.

  • by jensgk on 11/22/20, 2:24 PM

    Great hack :-)

    Reminds me of the vinyl records with games on, that were sometimes included with home computer magazines in the 80s: https://www.rediscoverthe80s.com/2014/01/80s-first-video-gam...

  • by selimnairb on 11/22/20, 7:42 PM

    Cool. I always wanted to boot from a SCSI scanner with the OS being stored on a series of paper print outs.

  • by asutekku on 11/22/20, 1:18 PM

    So the whining heard with dial-up modems was the sound of an actual data, huh. Never really thought about it, but super cool!

  • by fasteo on 11/22/20, 5:29 PM

    It reminds me of a ZX Spectrum "cassette interface" [1]. Great memories

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLy9_jkqxzc

  • by Hnrobert42 on 11/22/20, 2:08 PM

    What is ‘wow’ as it relates to vinyl? I tried searching the web for it, but just got a bunch of unrelated results?

  • by aminozuur on 11/22/20, 4:33 PM

    Day 187 of lockdown.

  • by CharlesW on 11/22/20, 5:56 PM

    Cool! I'm having a flashback to the time a friend and I decoded the "300 BPS N, 8, 1 (Terminal Mode Or ASCII Download)" track from Information Society's Peace and Love, Inc. album.

    https://genius.com/Information-society-300-bps-n-8-1-termina...

  • by tgbugs on 11/22/20, 10:43 PM

    I recently became curious about whether vinyl records might be a good choice for long term widespread backup of the information needed to bootstrap back to a full working Turing complete runtime, sort of as seeds for some future where much of the knowledge about computing had been lost. Somewhat absurd scenario, but interesting from a technical point of view due the the constraints you have to optimize for.

    Depending on what assumptions you make about the effective bandwidth available on a 33 rpm lp record is somewhere between 225MB and 15MB. That is easily enough space to fit a full fledged implementation of Common Lisp on somewhere between 1 and 4 records (SBCL's working tree is 40MB, and with its .git folder it is 152MB). There are countless other factors that would need to be considered, but I still like to imagine a sci-fi story about the search for the 5th record of lp-lisp needed to reboot civilization! The fact that someone has actually done something even remotely related to this is fantastic.

  • by wartijn_ on 11/22/20, 3:16 PM

    The site seems to be down. Here is an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20201122140338/http://boginjr.co...

  • by vool on 11/23/20, 3:07 PM

    The 8-bit Construction Se LP(2001) had two data tracks/ applications by Paul B. Davis which could run on Commodore 64 and Atari respectively.

    http://www.beigerecords.com/products/beg-004.html

  • by EvanAnderson on 11/23/20, 4:46 AM

    "Inside the Apple //e" included a program listing to digitize sound using the cassette interface[1]. Years before I got an audio digitizer for a PC I had great fun recording a few seconds at a time of audio on the machines in my public library. I made some floppies that booted and played audio samples. They were super slow to load and the sound quality wasn't great, but voices and songs were recognizable.

    [1] https://archive.org/details/InsideTheAppleIIe/page/n341/mode...

  • by lostgame on 11/22/20, 7:06 PM

    'Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.'

    No, seriously; though, as a programmer by day and turntablist at night this tickles both my nerd fancies hilariously.

    It, of course; makes entirely logical sense, as booting from tapes was obviously common back in the day.

    The turntablist side of me also needs to know how they managed to get it on the record. Is it just a dubplate? Do they have friends with a lathe? The article doesn't mention the process of getting that audio onto the vinyl. Surely it had to be custom-made for the process.

  • by flohofwoe on 11/23/20, 10:12 AM

    I haven't seen this mentioned in the article, but the BASICODE project (Netherlands, UK, West- and East-Germany) was a "real world example" where program code was distributed on vinyl records (and via radio stations):

    German Wikipedia entry: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE

    English Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE

  • by bch on 11/23/20, 3:13 AM

    See too Frank Sidebottom’s work from 1983.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25183229

  • by K0balt on 11/22/20, 3:50 PM

    So is this audio (cassette) boot method still there in modern pcs? I would love to have a pc that had to be booted by playing a track, then executing a hdd bootloader

  • by daniellarusso on 11/22/20, 2:52 PM

    Any good links for the vinyl lathe mentioned in the article?

  • by s_gourichon on 11/23/20, 12:05 PM

    Reminds me of various attempts to store video on vinyl, some analog, some digital.

    For example http://vinylvideo.supersense.com/ and this demo https://www.youtube.com/embed/Okdh7I06jFM (This one must be digital.)

  • by jbverschoor on 11/22/20, 5:28 PM

    If it was some unreleased OS, it'd be a bootleg

  • by larrydag on 11/22/20, 2:16 PM

    This is really neat. So I get that booting from non-standard devices is just a matter of digital signal processing. Really interesting using an amplifier get the signal. I imagine you can do almost any sort of analog to digital method. How about doing a boot loader from tin cans and a string? Being silly but in theory it should work.

  • by stakkur on 11/22/20, 5:36 PM

    I was booting Commodore Vic-20 games from an audio tape drive in the mid-80s. The record is a fun novelty, but it's the same idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette#Encoding

  • by doener on 11/22/20, 1:21 PM

    This is peak hipster.

  • by acvny on 11/23/20, 12:43 PM

    How I love that sound! Reminds me of the times when I was loading my https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector-06C from audio cassettes.

  • by mattl on 11/22/20, 8:39 PM

  • by userbinator on 11/22/20, 11:42 PM

    This is of course possible since booting was much simpler when all it had to do was read from the boot device into memory and jump to it. Definitely simpler than the horrible mess that is UEFI booting...

  • by ineedasername on 11/22/20, 5:41 PM

    I suppose it is solid-state. Makes me think there's an alternate universe out there where steampunk reigned supreme and records like this are the path that tech went down when the computer age hit.

  • by mixmastamyk on 11/23/20, 1:28 AM

    I do remember loading programs from cassette on my Vic-20. Occasionally I'd pop them into my Sears stereo to hear what was actually on them. Never thought of hooking up the phono. :D

  • by Tepix on 11/22/20, 4:59 PM

    This is sweet. I wonder if someone has hacked coreboot to boot from a UART, parallel port or sound card? That could make this viable with very little extra hardware as well.

  • by zmix on 11/23/20, 4:35 AM

    LOL, this must be the coolest project on a computer, I have come across, so far! I mean, how could you even come up with such a crazy idea? Nerds... :-)

  • by zebus806 on 11/23/20, 6:49 AM

    This is the good stuff and it was pretty neat, I would say necessary one some levels just to keep that kind of passion alive.

  • by tasuki on 11/22/20, 3:29 PM

    When I saw "45ot/min" on the record, I suspected the author was Czech or Slovak :)

  • by Ericson2314 on 11/22/20, 5:00 PM

    I thought it had to use the whole record? That data transfer was extremely fast!

  • by jagged-chisel on 11/22/20, 3:19 PM

    Groovy.

  • by neilwilson on 11/22/20, 2:39 PM

    Ah the wonderful sound reminiscent of a ZX Spectrum loading.

    What's the baud rate?

  • by p1mrx on 11/23/20, 2:04 AM

    Is there a reason to use 63 KiB (64512 bytes) instead of 64 KiB?

  • by hn3333 on 11/22/20, 1:17 PM

    Good old DOS. If I didn't know Unix I'd miss it!

  • by kylebenzle on 11/22/20, 6:38 PM

    I love and hate you guys so fucking much right now!!!

  • by tarkin2 on 11/22/20, 3:09 PM

    They didn’t consider hand-chiseled morse code?

  • by 867-5309 on 11/22/20, 7:58 PM

    very, very cool and all..

    .. but what does it sound like??

  • by jevgeni on 11/22/20, 2:47 PM

    Ah, the way it was meant to be.

  • by lasagna_coder on 11/23/20, 11:48 AM

    The audio track is my jam.

  • by ghego1 on 11/23/20, 8:33 AM

    Now, that sounds like DOS

  • by utxaa on 11/22/20, 6:04 PM

    this is the meaning of life.

  • by juststeve on 11/23/20, 10:16 AM

    now this is a quality post

  • by mikewarot on 11/22/20, 2:11 PM

    Well, that certainly is an interesting boot disc. 8)