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.
Would be sort of like paper tape.
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.
Fantastic IDEA seconded!
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 found a reference to a Thompson Twins game distributed by flexidisc in the UK.
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.
Haven't heard the audition, though. Well before my era.
Growing up in USSR I didn’t know anyone who would own a PC up until early 90s.
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.
Do not recommend.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Precise, but featureless digital clocks lack "soul" which you can actually see.
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.
https://www.discogs.com/master/321455-8-Bit-Construction-Set...
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.
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.
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.
Wait a minute, what?? How did I not know about this.
You could even use a TV!
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.
Penn [Jillette] said "If not for Randi there would not be Penn & Teller as we are today."Booting from a vinyl record - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25177045 - Nov 2020 (157 comments)
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.
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.
yt-dlp https://youtu.be/bqz65_YfcJg -o - | mpv -
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.)
Youtube has stopped working with privacy plugins on...
Cool idea.
master boot
record. :^)