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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
mrweasel|1 month ago
yesturi|1 month ago
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.
bobmcnamara|1 month ago
romforth|1 month ago
burnt-resistor|1 month ago
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.
estimator7292|1 month ago
ddingus|1 month ago
Fantastic IDEA seconded!
sandworm101|1 month ago
hackomorespacko|1 month ago
[deleted]
rwmj|1 month ago
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.
bpoyner|1 month ago
I found a reference to a Thompson Twins game distributed by flexidisc in the UK.
JimDabell|1 month ago
forinti|1 month ago
p0w3n3d|1 month ago
acka|1 month ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE
nuxi|1 month ago
ttkari|1 month ago
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.
yesturi|1 month ago
Haven't heard the audition, though. Well before my era.
binaryturtle|1 month ago
beardsciences|1 month ago
yesturi|1 month ago
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.
hinkley|1 month ago
Do not recommend.
casets|1 month ago
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.
kergonath|1 month ago
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.
el_benhameen|1 month ago
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.
WalterBright|1 month ago
colincooke|1 month ago
pixl97|1 month ago
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.
mr_toad|1 month ago
afandian|1 month ago
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.
LastTrain|1 month ago
https://www.discogs.com/master/321455-8-Bit-Construction-Set...
buildsjets|1 month ago
Twirrim|1 month ago
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.
hedgehog|1 month ago
jacquesm|1 month ago
I can totally see it working.
comprev|1 month ago
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.
thebruce87m|1 month ago
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.
foobarian|1 month ago
Wait a minute, what?? How did I not know about this.
alnwlsn|1 month ago
forinti|1 month ago
You could even use a TV!
estimator7292|1 month ago
numpad0|1 month ago
lucideer|1 month ago
clucas|1 month ago
nesarkvechnep|1 month ago
dang|1 month ago
Booting from a vinyl record - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25177045 - Nov 2020 (157 comments)
dylan604|1 month ago
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.
guerrilla|1 month ago
richrichardsson|1 month ago
hinkley|1 month ago
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.
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
RK07|1 month ago
hinkley|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
netsharc|1 month ago
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.
embedding-shape|1 month ago
afandian|1 month ago
nottorp|1 month ago
Youtube has stopped working with privacy plugins on...
hagbard_c|1 month ago
drweevil|1 month ago
idontwantthis|1 month ago
pjmlp|1 month ago
Cool idea.
beardsciences|1 month ago
dana321|1 month ago
knotsies|1 month ago
master boot
record. :^)
jackmarshl0w|1 month ago
pocksuppet|1 month ago
[deleted]
hackomorespacko|1 month ago
[deleted]