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.
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).
M-DISC [0] will probably cover most of the scenarios. It's still expensive, though.
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.
It's not such a huge step from an optical jukebox to a vinyl one :)
I can totally see it working.
Okay turning a jukebox into a drive carousel would be a pretty cool mod.
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.
Penn [Jillette] said "If not for Randi there would not be Penn & Teller as we are today."
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!
Early Hip Hop DJs used this exact property to go straight to the drum break and not waste time waiting for it.
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.
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.
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.
I knew my PC was booting normally by the sound of the floppy drives.
I keep an optical drive in my desktop for the sound it makes when it boots.
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.
> 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.
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!
> 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.
Same with QiC80 drives. You could hear when the drive failed to read data.
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
You can't just drop this without examples. What OSes and what were their tells?
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.
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?
>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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stepper motors were last used for HDDs with the capacity in megabytes.
I was thinking 5¼ floppies actually. But the same applies to the voice coils in newer hdds.
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.
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.
They would come in computer mags. Byte, Compute, Creative Computing. Hobbyist magazines. You had to record them to your cassette drive first.
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 my country they used to broadcast software for Atari 800 over radio - and it worked...
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].
I still have some old Amiga backups on VHS. Worked too… :)
Nice! Hi-fi VHS audio, or using one of those encoders that would pack the data into pixels?
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.
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.
PC-s were only described in hobby magazines, like Bajtek or Młody 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.
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?
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.)
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/
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.
One of the favorite records in my collection is the 8-Bit Construction Set 12" - chiptune + bootable Atari and C64 on the runouts.
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.
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.
Someone needs to give this a go!
Fantastic IDEA seconded!
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.
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.
Even older scanners were raw ISA piped over a centronix cable
Forth it up on a middle aged PowerPC Mac!
*were
> built-in “cassette interface” of the PC (that was hardly ever used)
Wait a minute, what?? How did I not know about this.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Good alternative for recent storage shortage
Okay, that is very cool. I love how doable it is too if you can get hands on the media that is.
They're fairly expensive, but on-demand vinyl is easy to get made.
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'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.
In most builds mpv has yt-dlp integrated, you can directly pass the URL to it.
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! :)
> 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?
Very unlikely, you need the browser for that
I would be very surprised if they didn't still have analytics tracking on the MPEG-DASH streams directly (what yt-dlp is downloading)
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.
I'd guess it skips running the JavaScript that reports to the Analytics backend...
Good thing yt-dlp is a browser.
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.
Youtube has tonnes of cookies! Why give youtube a free pass but not some independent hobbyist's site?
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.)
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.
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.
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).
M-DISC [0] will probably cover most of the scenarios. It's still expensive, though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
Yes. And it doesn’t have to be titanium per se. Cerabyte is trying to use ceramic. Even rocks might be good enough.
Nasa preferred gold (more specifically copper plated with nickel and then plated with gold) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
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.
It's not such a huge step from an optical jukebox to a vinyl one :)
I can totally see it working.
Okay turning a jukebox into a drive carousel would be a pretty cool mod.
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.
For your amusement: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-10-19-me-10336-...
Oh I wasn’t misremembering that.
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!
Early Hip Hop DJs used this exact property to go straight to the drum break and not waste time waiting for it.
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.
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.
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.
I knew my PC was booting normally by the sound of the floppy drives.
I keep an optical drive in my desktop for the sound it makes when it boots.
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.
> 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.
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!
> 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.
Same with QiC80 drives. You could hear when the drive failed to read data.
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
You can't just drop this without examples. What OSes and what were their tells?
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.
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?
>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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stepper motors were last used for HDDs with the capacity in megabytes.
I was thinking 5¼ floppies actually. But the same applies to the voice coils in newer hdds.
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.
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.
They would come in computer mags. Byte, Compute, Creative Computing. Hobbyist magazines. You had to record them to your cassette drive first.
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 my country they used to broadcast software for Atari 800 over radio - and it worked...
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
Simply Amazing. I'd love to know more about this.
Here's a couple of articles:
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/04/people-once-downloaded...
https://interestingengineering.com/science/you-could-downloa...
I still have some old Amiga backups on VHS. Worked too… :)
Nice! Hi-fi VHS audio, or using one of those encoders that would pack the data into pixels?
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.
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.
PC-s were only described in hobby magazines, like Bajtek or Młody 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.
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?
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.)
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/
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.
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.
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.
Someone needs to give this a go!
Fantastic IDEA seconded!
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.
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.
Even older scanners were raw ISA piped over a centronix cable
Forth it up on a middle aged PowerPC Mac!
*were
> built-in “cassette interface” of the PC (that was hardly ever used)
Wait a minute, what?? How did I not know about this.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Good alternative for recent storage shortage
Okay, that is very cool. I love how doable it is too if you can get hands on the media that is.
They're fairly expensive, but on-demand vinyl is easy to get made.
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.
I've started doing:
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.In most builds mpv has yt-dlp integrated, you can directly pass the URL to it.
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! :)
> 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?
Very unlikely, you need the browser for that
I would be very surprised if they didn't still have analytics tracking on the MPEG-DASH streams directly (what yt-dlp is downloading)
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.
I'd guess it skips running the JavaScript that reports to the Analytics backend...
Good thing yt-dlp is a browser.
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.
Youtube has tonnes of cookies! Why give youtube a free pass but not some independent hobbyist's site?
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.)
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.
Should have used his record cutter first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt6KMvkRM44
That’s a DVD. You monster.
How did he cut the record?
appears to be hugged to death for now.
Naughty Naughty Bad Gateway!
Sure, because why not!
Cool idea.
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