[HN Gopher] Booting from a vinyl record (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
Booting from a vinyl record (2020)
Author : yesturi
Score : 253 points
Date : 2026-01-23 10:39 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (boginjr.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (boginjr.com)
| guerrilla wrote:
| Okay, that is very cool. I love how doable it is too if you can
| get hands on the media that is.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| They're fairly expensive, but on-demand vinyl is easy to get
| made.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| hackomorespacko wrote:
| *were
| dang wrote:
| Thanks, I've taken the liberty of fixing the typo. (GP used
| to say "old scanners where SCSI")
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Even older scanners were raw ISA piped over a centronix cable
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| Forth it up on a middle aged PowerPC Mac!
| yesturi wrote:
| 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.
| ddingus wrote:
| 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.
| ddingus wrote:
| Someone needs to give this a go!
|
| Fantastic IDEA seconded!
| pjmlp wrote:
| Sure, because why not!
|
| Cool idea.
| netsharc wrote:
| 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.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| 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.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Very unlikely, you need the browser for that
| petcat wrote:
| I would be very surprised if they didn't still have
| analytics tracking on the MPEG-DASH streams directly (what
| yt-dlp is downloading)
| basilikum wrote:
| 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.
| netsharc wrote:
| I'd guess it skips running the JavaScript that reports to
| the Analytics backend...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Good thing yt-dlp _is_ a browser.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| 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.
| mariusor wrote:
| In most builds mpv has yt-dlp integrated, you can directly
| pass the URL to it.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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! :)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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?
| afandian wrote:
| Youtube has tonnes of cookies! Why give youtube a free pass but
| not some independent hobbyist's site?
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| 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.)
| rwmj wrote:
| 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.
| forinti wrote:
| 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.
| JimDabell wrote:
| 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.
| bpoyner wrote:
| 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.
| jnellis wrote:
| They would come in computer mags. Byte, Compute, Creative
| Computing. Hobbyist magazines. You had to record them to your
| cassette drive first.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| In my country they used to broadcast software for Atari 800 over
| radio - and it worked...
| binaryturtle wrote:
| I still have some old Amiga backups on VHS. Worked too... :)
| ddingus wrote:
| Nice! Hi-fi VHS audio, or using one of those encoders that
| would pack the data into pixels?
| yesturi wrote:
| 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.
| ekropotin wrote:
| 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.
| yesturi wrote:
| PC-s were only described in hobby magazines, like Bajtek or
| Mlody 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.
| ekropotin wrote:
| 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?
| 00N8 wrote:
| 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.)
| beardsciences wrote:
| Simply Amazing. I'd love to know more about this.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Here's a couple of articles:
|
| https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/04/people-once-
| downloaded...
|
| https://interestingengineering.com/science/you-could-
| downloa...
| acka wrote:
| 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
| nuxi wrote:
| Here's the ZX Spectrum version: https://www.racunalniski-
| muzej.si/en/40-years-later-a-game-f...
| ttkari wrote:
| 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.
| foobarian wrote:
| > built-in "cassette interface" of the PC (that was hardly ever
| used)
|
| Wait a minute, what?? How did I not know about this.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| 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.
| forinti wrote:
| 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!
| ddingus wrote:
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| 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.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| 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.
| yesturi wrote:
| 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.
| afandian wrote:
| 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.
| yesturi wrote:
| 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.
| ddingus wrote:
| 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.
| hkpack wrote:
| Stepper motors were last used for HDDs with the capacity in
| megabytes.
| afandian wrote:
| I was thinking 51/4 floppies actually. But the same applies
| to the voice coils in newer hdds.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >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.
| ddingus wrote:
| 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!
| colincooke wrote:
| 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
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| You can't just drop this without examples. What OSes and what
| were their tells?
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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.
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| 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?
| kergonath wrote:
| > 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.
| Lutzb wrote:
| Same with QiC80 drives. You could hear when the drive failed
| to read data.
| casets wrote:
| > 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.
| ddingus wrote:
| 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!
| WalterBright wrote:
| I knew my PC was booting normally by the sound of the floppy
| drives.
| ebergen wrote:
| I keep an optical drive in my desktop for the sound it makes
| when it boots.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| 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.
| beardsciences wrote:
| appears to be hugged to death for now.
| dana321 wrote:
| Naughty Naughty Bad Gateway!
| RK07 wrote:
| Should have used his record cutter first:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt6KMvkRM44
| hinkley wrote:
| That's a DVD. You monster.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| lucideer wrote:
| 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.
| clucas wrote:
| For your amusement: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
| xpm-1987-10-19-me-10336-...
| quickthrowman wrote:
| 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!
| hinkley wrote:
| Oh I wasn't misremembering that. Penn
| [Jillette] said "If not for Randi there would not be Penn &
| Teller as we are today."
| nesarkvechnep wrote:
| Early Hip Hop DJs used this exact property to go straight to
| the drum break and not waste time waiting for it.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| How did he cut the record?
| LastTrain wrote:
| 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...
| comprev wrote:
| 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.
| Twirrim wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's not such a huge step from an optical jukebox to a vinyl
| one :)
|
| I can totally see it working.
| hinkley wrote:
| Okay turning a jukebox into a drive carousel would be a
| pretty cool mod.
| hedgehog wrote:
| 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).
| kccqzy wrote:
| Yes. And it doesn't have to be titanium per se. Cerabyte is
| trying to use ceramic. Even rocks might be good enough.
| bayindirh wrote:
| M-DISC [0] will probably cover most of the scenarios. It's
| still expensive, though.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Nasa preferred gold (more specifically copper plated with
| nickel and then plated with gold)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| buildsjets wrote:
| 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/
| jackmarshl0w wrote:
| Good alternative for recent storage shortage
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _Booting from a vinyl record_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25177045 - Nov 2020 (157
| comments)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-23 23:00 UTC)