News: 1606402748

DOS on vinyl? I guess the B side was "A Momentary Lapse of Reason"?

It would be interesting to use a local (audio) radio transmitter as an alternative to net boot.

I wonder if it would be possible ( eg: would it have to start at exactly the right time? would the quality be high enough? )

I have a vague recollection of either a radio or TV show for early computer users (BBC Micro maybe?) that broadcast the code so that people at home could record it on cassette and try it at home.

Am I imagining that? Perhaps an older reader can add more information.

I well remember saving programs to (and sometimes successfully recovering them from) cassette tape on my Timex/Sinclair ZX81. I don't think I ever had a program on a vinyl record, though. Still have the computer and the tape player, and I'll bet if I dig deep enough I'll find the primitive drawing program (1 bit graphics!) I wrote.

Mine's the one with the audio jumper cables in the pocket.

I have a (now somewhat vague) memory of magazines occasionally supplying programs on flexidisc. Though given the plethora of computers and non-standard encoding it was a somewhat niche approach.

Taking this a step further, it should be possible to record that boot 'track' [see what I did there?] to an MP3, then be able to boot the PC from any MP3 player with a lead from the headphone jack.

Same with the old cassette games.

At least with MP3's, they wouldn't wear like physical tape would, or gum up the heads of the tape player. Also no worries about the pop+crackle you invariably get with vinyl. And you could carry an entire games library around with you on a modest 64gig SD card.

I don't know about that. It would have to depend on the specific process used to convert the signal into an analogue medium. Since MP3 compression is lossy and tends to be designed to better preserve melodic tones, the "noise" of even a datacassette stream is likely to be distorted too much to be played back reliably. Now, of course, if a device is able to play back a lossless audio stream like FLAC, then it's less an issue of psychoacoustic distortion and more a matter of getting the right dynamic range to correctly preserve the data in the recording.

Well, most people have a phone with internet access rather than an MP3 player these days, so [1]why not just stream the audio directly .

I love the fact that you can take a zip* of the program code (for Elite in this case), have a website* convert it to streaming audio over the internet*, which eventually arrives over some sort of wireless connection* to your smartphone*, and plug that into an original BBC Micro and have it work as if it was plugged into a standard cassette player.

* none of these technologies were around/easily available when the BBC Micro was sold

[1] http://playuef.8bitkick.cc/?FILE=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.stairwaytohell.com%2Fbbc%2Farchive%2Ftapeimages%2FSuperiorReRelease%2FElite-SRR_B.zip

... is how did Mr Bogin cut the groove on his vinyl boot disk?

Back in the day I had (and still have) a Garrard 301 fitted with an SME arm and Shure cartridge, but was never able to record anything at acceptable quality until the Akai Dolby-equipped cassette tape decks arrived in the early '70s.

I don't remember there being even a whisper of disk-cutting lathes being available for home use, so just what did our man use to cut his boot disk?

Given the recent vinyl revival, maybe he managed to get a test pressing from his audio file?

This is my guess, especially with the fact he used a 10" disc.

>I don't remember there being even a whisper of disk-cutting lathes being available for home use

There must be, otherwise how would hipsters listen to their MP3s ?

I remember a magazine back in the 80s (C&VG?) that had a cover disk once or twice - a ~7 inch slightly floppy vinyl record. I think each track was a different program for various home computers of the time - C64, Spectrum, BBC, etc. Pretty sure it predated the Amiga and Atari ST anyway.

C&VG had a covermount flexidisc for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum back in the day, and Personal Computer Games Issue 3 also had one containing all the program listings from the mag.

I seem to recall there were a few other of the popular mags at the time also carried flexidisc covermounts

https://www.popsike.com/Computer-and-Video-Games-The-Thompson-Twins-Rare-7-FlexiDisc-ZX-Spectrum/301366042105.html

I have a similar memory - I had to do a tape recording of it to run it as the combined unit I had the record player on didn't have any outputs (just a couple of connected poor quality speakers). Of course though the computers we were using back then "booted" from ROM normally into BASIC (unless you had a Sharp MZ700 then you had to load BASIC in by tape first).

I sorta remember that too, but perhaps you have just planted that memory in my brain.

Presumably we would have had to record the game* onto tape first to load it onto the C64 (other computers may have been available at the time).

*Yes, it would have to have been a game for you to bother going to the effort of recording it yourself onto a tape, wouldn't it?

but not he turntable? Or have I missed that bit?

Those of us of a certain age probably remember loading the bootstrap into a PDP-8 by reading settings from a book, setting up the switches on the front panel, and then loading them into memory, 1 byte at a time. And this was just to get it to read the next stage from punched tape!

Oh to have had the luxury of such a high speed loader.....!

;-)

--

Pete

Me too ... my first encounter with computers was at school where some of us teenagers were let loose with a DG Nova ... yes, I was one of the sort of teenager who's idea of a fun evening was to reinstall RDOS onto the (massive) disk drive starting from bootstrap on front panel switches (think it was 8 16-bit instructions long which at the time I knew from memory), then the "binary loader" tape (a few feet long only using 4 bits of each 8-bit char) followed by dozens of boxes of fan-fold tape (key skill was learning how to "catch" the tape as it came out of the 300cps tape reader so it folded itself up).

A couple of years ago I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and half way round saw that they had a DG Nova on display - I had to seriosuly restrain myself from leaning over and flicking the siwtches for old times sake!

Pete Shelley's XL1 album from 1983 was one of the first (if not /the/ first) music albums to include a computer program to display visuals to go alongside the music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4X2FG9Jbqw

For the time (and the limitations of the humble Speccy), it's actually a pretty sophisticated little "kareoke" experience - not least when you consider that kareoke hadn't actually landed in the UK at that point! Great minds think alike, I guess.

And from the interview with Joey Headen (who did the implementation), it was distributed as a track on the vinyl.

http://www.headen.com/XL1.htm