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Posted by yesturi 1/23/2026

Booting from a vinyl record (2020)(boginjr.com)
250 points | 98 commentspage 2
thebruce87m 1/23/2026|
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.

foobarian 1/23/2026||
> built-in “cassette interface” of the PC (that was hardly ever used)

Wait a minute, what?? How did I not know about this.

alnwlsn 1/23/2026||
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.
estimator7292 1/23/2026|||
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.
forinti 1/23/2026|||
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!

ddingus 1/23/2026||
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.

numpad0 1/23/2026||
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.
hinkley 1/23/2026||
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.

dylan604 1/23/2026||
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.

guerrilla 1/23/2026||
Okay, that is very cool. I love how doable it is too if you can get hands on the media that is.
richrichardsson 1/23/2026|
They're fairly expensive, but on-demand vinyl is easy to get made.
jackmarshl0w 1/23/2026||
Good alternative for recent storage shortage
netsharc 1/23/2026||
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.

embedding-shape 1/23/2026||
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.
mariusor 1/23/2026|||
In most builds mpv has yt-dlp integrated, you can directly pass the URL to it.
embedding-shape 1/23/2026|||
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! :)

thaumasiotes 1/23/2026|||
> 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?

0-_-0 1/23/2026|||
Very unlikely, you need the browser for that
petcat 1/23/2026|||
I would be very surprised if they didn't still have analytics tracking on the MPEG-DASH streams directly (what yt-dlp is downloading)
basilikum 1/23/2026||
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.
netsharc 1/23/2026||
I'd guess it skips running the JavaScript that reports to the Analytics backend...
embedding-shape 1/23/2026||
I ended up trying to look it up and found this:

> Available options: [...] mark_watched: Mark videos watched (even with --simulate). Only for YouTube

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/c8680b65f79cfeb23b342b...

So I'm guessing without that, it doesn't, so would have to add the flag for it to try to count it as a view.

estimator7292 1/23/2026|||
Good thing yt-dlp is a browser.
direwolf20 1/23/2026||
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.
afandian 1/23/2026|||
Youtube has tonnes of cookies! Why give youtube a free pass but not some independent hobbyist's site?
fc417fc802 1/23/2026||
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.)

hagbard_c 1/23/2026||
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.
RK07 1/23/2026||
Should have used his record cutter first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt6KMvkRM44
hinkley 1/23/2026|
That’s a DVD. You monster.
idontwantthis 1/23/2026|
How did he cut the record?
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