Booting DOS from Vinyl

[ropesjo]

Found this

A dude that manage to boot DOS from a Vinyl disc. it's crazy and awesome at the same time

 

 

Link to the blog

http://boginjr.com/it/sw/dev/vinyl-boot/

Link to YouTube

 

  

 

[Mark Kaine]

I believe he cheated when using that however...? 

 

 

I mean it didn't look usable... 

 

 

other than that if you can load from tape you can load from any other analog / sound source, it's quite trivial in theory also I bet tape holds more data... 

[WkdPaul]

* thread moved to the General Discussion section ; this isn't news *

[ropesjo]

@wkdpaulJust for curiosity, why is this not news? blog post is from 19:t November.
Just so i don't do another dodo when posting.

 

[Kilrah]

The Tech News forum is about industry news and has a massive banner at the top of the forum to the posting template that needs to be followed.

"guy did cool thing" doesn't comply...

[ropesjo]

Ok sorry, and thanks fore the input.

[mariushm]

It's not booting from DOS.  It's booting from floppy, loading bootloader which then simply converts the audio to bits and makes a ram drive.  Nothing special.

 

Would have been special if he made a custom floppy drive controller using an arduino and some stepper motors or something to provide seeks on the vynil, lifting needle to move to other track and so on.

 

As it is, you can replace the vinyl with a cassette tape and you get the same thing.  There was MS-DOS and Basic on casette tapes, sold commercially even.

 

[WkdPaul]

Someone doing something out of the ordinary with tech, and then posting it on a blog isn't news.

 

From the Tech News posting guidelines ;

 

Quote

Tech News means news regarding technology or gaming.

Quote

Your thread must include a link to at least one reputable source. Most of the time, this should be a respected news site.

 

 

While booting from a vinyl is cool, it's not news worthy. It's not something anyone else is going to attempt (appart a few for the cool factor) and isn't something that's going to be used or implemented anywhere. We still can discuss it, that's why it was moved rather than deleted.

[whm1974]

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

It's not booting from DOS.  It's booting from floppy, loading bootloader which then simply converts the audio to bits and makes a ram drive.  Nothing special.

 

Would have been special if he made a custom floppy drive controller using an arduino and some stepper motors or something to provide seeks on the vynil, lifting needle to move to other track and so on.

 

As it is, you can replace the vinyl with a cassette tape and you get the same thing.  There was MS-DOS and Basic on casette tapes, sold commercially even.

 

What is the dude actually doing? I can see him starting the record player, then something shows up on the screen. After that he puts in the floppy, types on keyboard and reads the disk contents.

 

Wait he starts a bootloader for the record player?

[Mark Kaine]

42 minutes ago, whm1974 said:

What is the dude actually doing? I can see him starting the record player, then something shows up on the screen. After that he puts in the floppy, types on keyboard and reads the disk contents.

 

Wait he starts a bootloader for the record player?

No, I think he starts a bootloader for the disk. Aka cheating lol... 

 

I guess DOS maybe too big for a vinyl record? how big is DOS? I suppose under 1.5MB?

 

[whm1974]

13 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

No, I think he starts a bootloader for the disk. Aka cheating lol... 

 

I guess DOS maybe too big for a vinyl record? how big is DOS? I suppose under 1.5MB?

 

How much storage did the floppies for the IBM PC hold? The Machine looks like a 5150. And didn't DOS at the time came on a single 5 1/4" Disk?

[Mark Kaine]

27 minutes ago, whm1974 said:

How much storage did the floppies for the IBM PC hold? The Machine looks like a 5150. And didn't DOS at the time came on a single 5 1/4" Disk?

apparently around 360 kilobyte... 

 

 

and I did some googling, it seems a vinyl record could hold around 200mb... not sure but it seems obvious that the capacity would be a lot larger, similar to audio tapes, than a floppy disc.... so that shouldn't be the issue... 

 

 

it's still weird that he's loading things *after* he supposedly loaded DOS, although that might have been just drivers and stuff... 

 

 

ps: while I certainly don't know the exact capacities, it's really irritating to me how little info there is about analog data storage, and the vast majority of people seem to believe data can only be stored "digitally"... 

 

I've seen people even believe things like synthesizers could only be "digital" lol... oh well! 

 

Edit: this is a good find imo - still don't know the capacities though 

 

Quote

There’s a large element of “back to the future” irony here. Not only was magnetic tape the first high-density data-storage mechanism, predating hard disk drives, but early “hobbyist” personal computers used the consumer-audio Philips cassette as a low-cost medium (admittedly low speed, low capacity) for both loading the operating system via a “boot loader” and also storing programs and data. Use of magnetic tape for both hobby and commercial applications fell out of favor with the development of reasonably priced, random-access, high-density hard drives, but the underlying magnetic-tape technologies still have a vital role to play – one which seems to be growing again.

 

https://www.planetanalog.com/the-hottest-data-storage-medium-ismagnetic-tape/

 

ps: there are even "analog discs" which theoretically would be the best storage medium ever, though they didn't really succeed sadly (look up: "magneto optical disk") 

 

[whm1974]

6 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

apparently around 360 kilobyte... 

 

 

and I did some googling, it seems a vinyl record could hold around 200mb... not sure but it seems obvious that the capacity would be a lot larger, similar to audio tapes, than a floppy disc.... so that shouldn't be the issue... 

 

 

it's still weird that he's loading things *after* he supposedly loaded DOS, although that might have been just drivers and stuff... 

 

 

ps: while I certainly don't know the exact capacities, it's really irritating to me how little info there is about analog data storage, and the vast majority of people seem to believe data can only be stored "digitally"...

200MB??? HDDs didn't even have anywhere near that much at the time. I shouldn't be surprised considering the size of the vinyl, and how big in size were they?

 

[Kilrah]

33 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

and I did some googling, it seems a vinyl record could hold around 200mb...

Wonder how you found that... an example at the time (C64) would record about 55 bytes per second of audio, so the 44 mins of a double sided LP would hold about 142kB.

[Mark Kaine]

1 minute ago, Kilrah said:

Wonder how you found that.

GOOGLE LOL 

 

 

1 minute ago, Kilrah said:

would record about 55 bytes per second of audio, so the 44 mins of a double sided LP would hold about 142kB.

Btw the record says "64k" so that would check out, it just seemed really small to me, likely too small to store "DOS" even? 

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

17 minutes ago, whm1974 said:

200MB??? 

Well, it appears several reddit and similar threads are *wrong* and have no idea, who would have thought! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[whm1974]

2 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Well, it appears several reddit and similar threads are *wrong* and have no idea, who would have thought! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

About vinyl:

https://www.kempa.com/vinyl-data/

And the Floppy-ROM:

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/the-floppy-rom-software-distributed-on-records/

[dilpickle]

Try punch cards

[Mark Kaine]

3 hours ago, whm1974 said:

And the Floppy-ROM:

I remember those records! just not with data, they usually came with magazines and such and where really thin and flimsy, but worked well enough... usually didn't have great content tho... 

 

1 hour ago, dilpickle said:

Try punch cards

how many kb / punch tho?  

[whm1974]

1 hour ago, dilpickle said:

Try punch cards

Were Punch Cards ever used with Microcomputers? Considering how expensive 8" and 5 1/4" FDDs were during the 70's, I wouldn't be surprised if a few people did. Surely this would be far easier then flipping a series of toggle switches for entire programs.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, whm1974 said:

Were Punch Cards ever used with Microcomputers? Considering how expensive 8" and 5 1/4" FDDs were during the 70's, I wouldn't be surprised if a few people did. Surely this would be far easier then flipping a series of toggle switches for entire programs.

Punch cards were used until the Altair 8800 (which used paper tape, not cards, but same idea.)

 

The problem really is that some evolution had to happen in the time before BIOS. Once computers had a BIOS to boot the computer to a state that some other storage medium could be used.

 

[whm1974]

32 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Punch cards were used until the Altair 8800 (which used paper tape, not cards, but same idea.)

 

The problem really is that some evolution had to happen in the time before BIOS. Once computers had a BIOS to boot the computer to a state that some other storage medium could be used.

 

Yeah but the "Big Problem" with CP/M is that each Vendor that offered CP/M Systems all used different 5 1.4" Floppy Disk Types.