Booting from a vinyl record (2020)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall reaction & feasibility

  • Commenters find the vinyl-boot project delightful, especially because it’s achievable with hobbyist tools and on-demand vinyl pressing.
  • Some joke about modern relevance (“good alternative for recent storage shortage”) and compatibility (“probably not UEFI/secure boot friendly, more like MBR-era hardware”).

Alternative boot/media experiments

  • Several brainstorm using scanners as boot devices via SCSI and BIOS/UEFI drivers, or reading bits off printed pages with optical scanners (black/white or shapes encoding 0/1).
  • People extend the idea to graph paper where you literally color in bits, likening it to paper tape or optical mark cards from old BASIC classes.

Historical software distribution hacks

  • Memories of software shipped on flexidiscs in magazines; they were so fragile you were told to copy to cassette immediately.
  • Many reminisce about loading programs from audio cassettes on 8-bit machines (Acorn/BBC, C64, Tandy, Apple, etc.).
  • Several recall “downloading” games over FM radio for Atari, ZX Spectrum, C64, and via BASICODE in some countries; success depended on reception and tape quality.
  • Data was also backed up to VHS, either via audio or encoded video “QR-like” patterns.

Physicality and “feel” of old storage

  • Strong nostalgia for when storage was noisy, slow, and obviously mechanical; users could often detect errors or fragmentation by sound alone.
  • Stories of fragile Zip and QIC drives, flaky floppies (e.g., Slackware installs over many failing disks), and temperamental cassette loaders; but also admiration for the engineering (steppers, voice coils, tight tolerances).
  • Several emphasize how these constraints drove them to learn programming and data management.

Cookies, video, and tooling

  • Some dislike the article’s cookie popup and share a direct YouTube link.
  • Others discuss bypassing the browser using yt-dlp and mpv, debate whether that still counts as a “view,” and note that yt-dlp runs just enough JavaScript to get streams but not full analytics.

Vinyl-specific & archival angles

  • People appreciate vinyl’s visible track layout and manual “seeking,” and connect this to DJ techniques like going straight to drum breaks.
  • DJ commenters praise the tactile, unforgiving nature of vinyl compared to digital setups.
  • There’s a tangent on ultra-durable physical media (titanium, ceramics, M-DISC, gold records) and joking about archival systems like Glacier storing data on “vinyl.”