[HN Gopher] Booting from a vinyl record
___________________________________________________________________
Booting from a vinyl record
Author : ruik
Score : 637 points
Date : 2020-11-22 12:51 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (boginjr.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (boginjr.com)
| daniellarusso wrote:
| Any good links for the vinyl lathe mentioned in the article?
| larrydag wrote:
| 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.
| justusthane wrote:
| It's a totally different thing, but your string comment
| reminded me of "DSL over wet string":
| https://boingboing.net/2017/12/13/rfc-2549.html
| K0balt wrote:
| 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
| K0balt wrote:
| I see now it was an original pc, so, no lol
| jecel wrote:
| One of the improvements of the 1983 PC XT (5160) over the
| 1981 PC (5150) was the removal of the tape port since nobody
| was using it and it was an extra (and confusing) connector on
| the back. The other improvements were more on-board memory,
| more slots (closer together) and HD support.
| CharlesW wrote:
| 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...
| Tepix wrote:
| 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.
| ajnin wrote:
| 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
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I thought it had to use the whole record? That data transfer was
| extremely fast!
| jbverschoor wrote:
| If it was some unreleased OS, it'd be a bootleg
| fasteo wrote:
| It reminds me of a ZX Spectrum "cassette interface" [1]. Great
| memories
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLy9_jkqxzc
| jensgk wrote:
| 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...
| rwmj wrote:
| Oh yes, the ultimate in "play once" media in my experience. You
| had to copy them over to a tape to have any chance of loading
| them more than one time.
| tasuki wrote:
| When I saw "45ot/min" on the record, I suspected the author was
| Czech or Slovak :)
| lisper wrote:
| 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?
| vjshah wrote:
| The author makes a very brief mention of creating his own
| record using a lathe.
| lisper wrote:
| Heh. TIL.
|
| https://www.designboom.com/technology/phonocut-vinyl-
| pressin...
| inopinatus wrote:
| Hey, some of us old-timers fondly remember the natural warmth,
| presence, and low syscall latency of operating systems booted
| from vinyl.
| jonplackett wrote:
| This is the most 'Hacker News' title I have ever seen
| ac112 wrote:
| Something like "How I bootstrapped my Bitcoin startup from a
| vinyl record" would be even more Hackernewsy.
| identity0 wrote:
| "Blockchain-based vinyl bootstrapper, written in Rust"
| Kye wrote:
| The new spinning Rust.
| 0xFFFE wrote:
| Running serverless
| FrozenVoid wrote:
| Quantum Blockchain Vinyl Coinwallet with RFC1149 Support,
| written in Literate Haskell
| [deleted]
| lebuffon wrote:
| 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
| clpwn wrote:
| Yeah, and the treble at least was reduced exactly the amount
| the RIAA curve should reduce it (-10dB at 10kHz).
|
| There are a ton of cheap "dubplate" vinyl cutting shops out
| there, and it seems like maybe the OP sent off to one of these
| shops to print their ROM. Otherwise, they could have just re-
| cut a new vinyl with the equalization fixes baked in...
| cat199 wrote:
| isn't part of the reason for the curve to keep the needle
| from bouncing out of the groove?
| jacquesm wrote:
| it's simply to maximize the run-time of the vinyl. If you
| didn't use the compensation curve you'd have to cut wider
| tracks to accommodate the lows, and that would mean you'd
| get less time on a side.
| wayvey wrote:
| Are you saying they could have cut it without RIAA
| equalisation? That probably wouldn't work as the recording
| might not fit on the record without it. Quoting from
| Wikipedia:
|
| > The purposes of the equalization are to permit greater
| recording times (by decreasing the mean width of each
| groove), to improve sound quality, and to reduce the groove
| damage that would otherwise arise during playback.
| utxaa wrote:
| this is the meaning of life.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| very, very cool and all..
|
| .. but what does it sound like??
| anamexis wrote:
| There's a video of it playing at the bottom of the article.
| aminozuur wrote:
| Day 187 of lockdown.
| stakkur wrote:
| 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
| tgbugs wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
|
| > 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
|
| Don't vinyl records experience physical decay over time?
| ArtWomb wrote:
| 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 ;)
| [deleted]
| cat199 wrote:
| a 64bit DOS flavor with VT-x/SVM shim could be very good for
| 'cloud'
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Ataris could load bootable apps; mostly games; from tape, too.
| I had one; it was glitchy as hell, but oh how my early high
| school self rejoiced when it worked.
| graton wrote:
| I remember having a TRS-80 Model I and using the cassette tape
| to load and save programs. I'll be honest it was a very happy
| day when I finally got a floppy drive!
| hn3333 wrote:
| Good old DOS. If I didn't know Unix I'd miss it!
| tarkin2 wrote:
| They didn't consider hand-chiseled morse code?
| reaperducer wrote:
| That would actually be easier than what we actually had to do
| flipping switches to enter a binary bootloader into old
| computers.
| asutekku wrote:
| So the whining heard with dial-up modems was the sound of an
| actual data, huh. Never really thought about it, but super cool!
| pantulis wrote:
| That was your modem negotiating the protocol and speed with the
| remote modem, not proper data. Still, if your mother happened
| to use the phone line while you were connected, she would heard
| the actual data on the line, just before the connection broke.
| Oh, the times.
| nmg wrote:
| Best feature of BBS software (WWIV, Telegard, etc.) - the
| "fake line noise" button, which feigned data corruption as if
| someone picked up the phone. It displayed garbage characters
| to the logged in user, and then you could disconnect them.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| modem = MOdulator + DEModulator
|
| Dial-up modems used the public switched telephone network to
| transmit data via audio signals through regular phone calls.
| The modems had an internal speaker so the operator could
| "debug" the connection with their ears, e.g. if they called the
| wrong number and an actual person was talking on the other end.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Technically, all the stuff heard at the beginning was
| initialization and training stuff. The actual data is the
| uniform hiss/roar just before the speaker cut off.
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/the-m...
|
| At least for modems near the end of the period. The very first
| ones at 300bps really did sound like cassette audio.
| npteljes wrote:
| Very similar to the sound of the Commodore data tapes when
| inserted to a regular cassette player. Tried it as a kid, I was
| convinced I broke something.
|
| Random example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVsY9PVIKsQ
| senko wrote:
| Dual cassete players were great for copying programs/games!
|
| Also reminds me of Amiga's Video Backup System which made use
| of Amiga's video processing capabilities to output data and
| read from VHS tapes. That was a slow process but could store
| large amounts of data, and you just needed a VCR.
| gus_massa wrote:
| You may like this classic HN post " _The sound of the dialup,
| pictured_ " http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-
| dialup-pictured... (HN discussions
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15635144 (675 points | Nov
| 6, 2017 | 108 comments) and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171514 (174 points | on
| Mar 9, 2015 | 35 comments))
| kylebenzle wrote:
| I love and hate you guys so fucking much right now!!!
| lb1lf wrote:
| "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.
| aetherson wrote:
| 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.
| iaw wrote:
| Part of me wants to think that that would add wear to the
| mechanism but the other part of me remembers how things were
| built back then.
| Shivetya wrote:
| Back in the late eighties I was in the Air Force and we had a
| Burroughs machine; replete with all the lights you see in old
| science fiction; that could be booted through paper tape. I was
| an octal setup. We also could theoretically boot this machine
| by switches but never saw that done.
|
| This was one of the first machines built for the service that
| did not require tubes so that gives you the idea of the age of
| this and it was in daily use in the 1986-1989. Even the main
| base computer, Sperry 1100/60? took cards in for data input.
| Late 88,89 we finally got most cards down to disk images
| uploaded through a Sperry branded PC. My first useful Turbo
| Pascal program replaced the provided software and could
| read/write from the mainframe at many times the rate of the
| canned software.
|
| We also jokingly had a kick start Sperry, one pack would stick
| sometimes on boot; you had to swap packs for secure processing;
| and the fix was to face away from it and hit the side firmly
| with your foot flat on.
| FpUser wrote:
| Great post, it made me smile and brought some memories. Btw I
| did use punch tapes in the beginning of times and the speed
| with which the mech pulled those through was insanely fast (at
| least to my eye). Maybe I've dealt with some later generation
| tech?
| ntucker wrote:
| I love this kind of stuff. The fact that we (people in our
| field; not me specifically) had to and could do stuff like this
| must seem crazy ancient to the younger folks here. I did boot
| my first computer from a cassette tape, and I can still
| remember what it sounded like and it's so, so very nostalgic.
| And many of us did get our first internet access via these
| crazy noises as well. I'm sure I could also listen to a modem
| connecting and tell you what speed it had negotiated from
| 1200baud all the way up to 56k, since each new sound was, at
| one point, the pinnacle of excitement since I'd just upgraded
| to something new (and then I heard it thousands of times).
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Great story! FWIW this is kind of the origin story for Mylar
| "paper tape" as well. When paper tape started being used for
| controlling machine tools (the NC in CNC), the paper tape would
| not hold up well in a shop. It could get grease or water on it
| which would compromise its integrity and then it would tear. So
| a "stronger" paper tape was created but it had to be compatible
| with older paper tape reader/punches. It was great stuff.
| doener wrote:
| This is peak hipster.
| throwanem wrote:
| Not quite. No Aeropress.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Waiting on the multicolor vinyl special release with additional
| liner notes and outtakes.
| aidos wrote:
| 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.
| bhickey wrote:
| Rejecting cookies and going to about:blank. That's a great design
| decision.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Privacy badger blocked a whole load of cookies but I was able
| to get rid of the banner without clicking the dumb consent
| button with one of my favourite addons, "hide fixed elements".
|
| Quite a petty design choice if you ask me.
| adregan wrote:
| It's also not compliant in the countries that require the
| cookie banner.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Good luck extraditing.
| fbelzile wrote:
| It's especially frustrating when the only reason for the
| consent banner is because they decided to use Google Analytics
| [1]. Just use something selfhosted like Matomo with a few
| privacy settings enabled [2] and then bam! no more annoying
| consent banners for visitors, no more Google tracking your
| visitors, and you still get the metrics you want. Everyone wins
| (well, except Google).
|
| [1] http://boginjr.com/gdpr/
|
| [2] https://matomo.org/faq/new-to-piwik/how-do-i-use-matomo-
| anal...
| ryandrake wrote:
| Or, and I know this is almost heresy here, but why not just
| leave off analytics? This is essentially a static page with
| text and images. What on earth are you analyzing? Why do you
| need to collect any data at all?
| pushrax wrote:
| Vanity (in my experience). Though I don't know why web
| server logs aren't enough for that.
|
| Engagement duration tracking is probably the most important
| thing client-side analytics brings for a site that's trying
| to make money, but for a personal site, seems unnecessary.
| lostgame wrote:
| '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.
| ineedasername wrote:
| 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.
| neilwilson wrote:
| Ah the wonderful sound reminiscent of a ZX Spectrum loading.
|
| What's the baud rate?
| wartijn_ wrote:
| The site seems to be down. Here is an archive.org link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201122140338/http://boginjr.co...
| mattl wrote:
| See also: https://retro-
| treasures.blogspot.com/2011/05/codemasters-cd-...
| excalibur wrote:
| 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.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| What is 'wow' as it relates to vinyl? I tried searching the web
| for it, but just got a bunch of unrelated results?
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow_(recording)
| rzzzt wrote:
| I think flutter is the same thing, the inability to maintain
| constant and precise angular velocity.
| lebuffon wrote:
| Wow is slow frequency speed variation. Flutter is fast speed
| variation.
|
| To an audio person they are distinct sound artifacts. It was
| common to listen to recordings of pianos in the past to hear
| these because the piano was the only common instrument that
| had very solid pitch. (invariant frequency(
| fleaaa wrote:
| It literally sounds like guitar wow pedel when it happens. It's
| due to the fluctuation of the speed of the turntable.
|
| In that video the turntable seems like Audio Technica's
| Technics 1200sl knock-off version which is quite infamous for
| instability, it seems fine in short video though. Very
| impressive nonetheless.
| airstrike wrote:
| From the best English dictionary IMHO:
| https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=wow
|
| _> wow2, n._
|
| _> Slow variation in the pitch of a sound reproduction
| resulting from variations in the speed of the recording or
| reproducing equipment._
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Groovy.
| ac42 wrote:
| Ouch!
| jevgeni wrote:
| Ah, the way it was meant to be.
| selimnairb wrote:
| Cool. I always wanted to boot from a SCSI scanner with the OS
| being stored on a series of paper print outs.
| protomyth wrote:
| 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.
| mtmail wrote:
| The video suggests 64kb in 45min for vinyl, the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette was 100kb in
| 30min tape.
| cookiewill wrote:
| Could you use a tortilla instead of the vinyl record ? I
| immediately thought of a video I saw where a tortilla was used as
| a record, and some music could actually play back, although it
| was very distorted.
| qwertox wrote:
| Next step is to get Doom running from the B-Side?
| mikewarot wrote:
| Well, that certainly is an interesting boot disc. 8)
| K0balt wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| reaperducer wrote:
| It's interesting how old analog audio technology still finds
| itself useful in these days of terabyte drives and satellite
| internet.
|
| Some retro computer enthusiasts have taken to storing their
| programs as MP3 files. That way they can be loaded into a
| cassette interface using a hand-held voice recorder. Instead of
| carrying around a suitcase of tapes, you can store everything
| in the palm of your hand. It's also supposed to help protect
| against bitrot, but I don't know if that's true. Still, bitrot
| is a serious concern in retro computing circles because one bad
| bit in a 10 GB Windows game is probably harmless. But one bad
| bit in a 10K Apple ][ game will likely ruin it.
|
| Also, I remember when I got my Amazon on-demand ordering
| buttons, they were set up using an analog modem sort of thing.
| It's been a long while, but from what I remember, when the
| buttons arrived, I'd open the Amazon app and tell it I was
| programming the button, then hold down the button on the button
| thing and the button and the phone would squawk to each other.
| It sounded very much like a 300 baud connection, but without
| the underlying carrier tone -- just data.
| pantulis wrote:
| Well as long as the mp3 loads just fine for the first time I
| dont see how bitrot could happen.
| [deleted]
| arcticbull wrote:
| The Square card readers that plugged into the headphone jacks
| were also analog modems. Well, the swipe variants were just
| "mo" (modulators) and the phones were the "dems"
| (demodulators). The first chip card reader, that plugged into
| the headphone jack, built a full bi-directional soft modem
| onto either end.
|
| In theory you should be able to update the firmware on one of
| the chip card readers with one of these vinyl records and a
| 1/8" adapter.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| MP3 files? What do they do to maintain integrity with lossy
| compression?
|
| WAV or FLAC i could see, but MP3?
| dialamac wrote:
| The fidelity of standard non high bias tape at compact
| cassette speeds is already shit compared to even low
| bitrate mp3. It's not a problem in practice.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's a fair question. Tape interfaces had very limited
| bandwidth. The original Kansas standard used frequency
| switching (FSK) between four cycles of 1200Hz and eight
| cycles of 2400Hz. Later faster variations used the same
| frequencies but cut the number of cycles for faster load
| speeds.
|
| MP3 compression works by removing frequencies that are
| (supposedly) too quiet to be audible. If you only have two
| very loud frequencies in a frame they pass through the
| compression process unscathed.
|
| The switching hash around them and the tape noise may get
| munged but that doesn't affect the data stream. So vbr MP3
| ends up being an efficient and clean representation, and
| cbr works too but isn't quite so compact.
|
| Edit: in fact some radio and TV shows in the 70s would
| transmit software live, and that worked fine too. I never
| tried it, but I suspect you could probably use a phone line
| - for early adventures in software piracy.
| StavrosK wrote:
| If you're going to play it over a speaker, you already have
| way more signal loss than the compression is going to
| introduce. The solution is redundancy.
| jleahy wrote:
| There's a very good chance that a single bad bit in a 10 GB
| Windows game will prevent it from loading.
|
| The average game might contain a multi-megabyte executable
| along with gigabytes of assets. Those assets will be stored
| in some kind of compressed format (for example Quake III used
| 'pk3' files, which were actually zips). These compressed
| files with inevitably have checksums, and an invalid checksum
| will prevent them from loading.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| You're assuming the game engine will panic on a bit error
| loading what's probably a texture or model mesh. This
| probably isn't the case for most games, especially release
| builds. You might get a console message.
| jleahy wrote:
| A 1-bit error in a compressed file will cause every
| subsequent bit in the entire file to end up wrong (well,
| 50% of them), and probably the file length to end up
| wrong, and probably the decompression state machine to
| get stuck and confused. This is why basically all
| compressed formats carry a CRC (eg. zip, gz, xz).
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| If anyone is interested in amateur radio, sending and receiving
| memes over SSTV is great fun.
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(page generated 2020-11-22 23:00 UTC)