Software Distribution By Vinyl

townxelliot writes "Beige Records is home to the intriguing 8-Bit Construction Set. Their record has the distinction of being "the first ever use of the vinyl recording medium for software distribution - the inside tracks are audio data which can be dubbed to cassette tape and booted in your respective atari or commodore 8-bit computers". Samples of their music ("entirely programmed in 6502 assembly language") are available for download."

Increasing amount of data.

[Phucilage]

I wonder if you'll be able to pull the same ole trick w/ this method as you did with music. If you used lighter grooves, you able to pack more music in, it'd just be more quiet, deeper grooves was louder music, but less of them.

Video on Vinyl

[fons]

This reminded me of this guys:
http://www.vinylvideo.com/

Was that a hoax or does it really work?

Re:Data on vinyl done before

[shippo]

I acquired three such flexi-disks on the front cover of UK computer magazines around 1982 to 1984. Only got a moderate success rate with them. One was an adventure game, with a prize awarded amongst those who could solve it. I had reverse engineered the workings of the game compiler used to create the game, so solving it should have been easy, but I couldn't get it to load at all.

Not first post...

[tgv]

I don't think this is a primer. I remember a magazine (perhaps Keyboard Magazine) that had a disk with software in the 80s. And of course, there was the Dutch radio that broadcasted software over FM...

It's hardly a first

[stx23]

Diverse artists such as Tomita, Shakin' Stevens & the Thompson Twins distributed software on vinyl over 20 years ago.

http://www.kempa.com/blog/archives/000053.html [kempa.com]

OH DEAR.
a bat bit

you.

TI-99/4A

[lbmouse]

This reminds me of the TI-99/4A's [oldcomputers.net] cassette tape storage. For those of us who couldn't afford to buy the floppy drive, it was fun wating 30+ minutes to save/load your programs. It would wait for you to flip the tape or change it if needed. I guess what did you expect for $500 in the early 80's?

Pete Shelley (ex-Buzzcocks) did this in 1983

[Anonymous Coward]

check out the album XL1 by Pete Shelley (ex-Buzzcocks). apart from being a great album,
the last track on this album called "zx spectrum code" contains computer graphics for the sinclair zx spectrum computer. see http://freespace.virgin.net/pete.shelley/xl1-01.ht m
cheers, lars

like the modem tones

[Anonymous Coward]

there was an artists who did a track on his cd. (matthew sweet maybe?) and it was basically a one-sided modem transmission. you could put a phone near the speaker and get a text message from the artist. i think it was at like 300 baud or something so it wasn't much, and this was like 10 years ago now.

Re:Data on vinyl done before

[moon-monster]

There used to be a few speccy games on vinyl. In fact, a few 80's pop acts (Thompson Twins, Shakin' Stevens) released some as B-sides on some of their singles.

Apparently the game wasn't very good.

There's some more info on previous data-on-vinyl experiments here [kempa.com].

Re:Hasn't this been done before?

[Bigman]

Does anyone remember that the BBC also transmitted BBC-Micro programs using Teletext pages? (as mentioned on this page [nvg.org]) I never had a BBC Micro but my cousin did. You could either copy the pages off the screen or if you had a teletext adapter the computer could fetch them. They did this right up to 1987.
Ahh, the old 8-bit days......

Re:6502 Assembly Language

[WWWWolf]

Fairly brute force, don't you think?

Haven't really programmed C64 for a while, but here goes... haven't assembled it or anything...

.segment "CODE"
.import CHROUT
.import P1 ; that pointer in zeropage
.proc helloslash
init: ldy #$00
lda # sta P1
lda #>_msg
sta P1+1
ploop: lda (p1),y
cmp #$00
beq out
iny
jsr CHROUT
jmp ploop
out: rts
_msg: .ascii "hELLO sLASHDOT"
.byte 00
.endproc

Or, if you want to use BASIC ROM,

.segment "CODE"
.proc helloslash lda # ldy #>_msg
jsr $AB1E
rts
_msg: .ascii "hELLO sLASHDOT"
.byte 00
.endproc

History of cardboard records

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've interest beyond genning wisecrax, here is an interesting site that discusses the history of cardboard records.

The Internet Museum of [wfmu.org]
FLEXI/CARDBOARD/ODDITY
Records - Records - Records

I guess the hobby magazines of the MOSTEK era were just too cheap to include code on flexi media. FWIW I still have two KIM-1 and a bunch of cassette tapes. One is early ceramic chip andotherislater plastic. It was quitethemachinein it's day for cheap computer play.

Wonder if these guys (referenced in parent article) have given flexi any thought?

I also wonder if anyone remembers optical pickup phonograph record transducers. They were expensive but would keep your vinyl in pristine condition.

At the other end of the spectrum, there were record it at home devices using a hot wire and acetate disks or tape. This system was also used with a large acetate loop for recording police calls, including the JFK assination shots back in '64.

All in all mechanical sound reproduction is pretty neat and if you think about your experience with other recording media, may be the only thing that survives into the next millenium.

FWIW I also have a working example of the Walkie-Recordall mentioned in this recording history link [recording-history.org].

I am not affiliated with any of the referenced sites.

If chickens can learn to play the piano, why do dolphins(not the fish) get all the press?

What about FM Radio

[Pope Raymond Lama]

In the late 80's there was a radio program in Sao Paulo (The Sao Paulo University Radio, BTW), that did broadcast computer software at 2400bps.

IIRC it was some ZX-Spectrum games that they did transmit.

I myself never tried to tape the transmitions and use them, although.

Re: 3 grooves

[cosmic_0x526179]

"Matching Tie and Handkerchief" has two parallel groves on one side. No mention of the material on the second track either. I always wondered why that side played so fast until I accidently hit the hidden track one time.

Re:Data on vinyl done before

[Technician]

One prior art that I know about is the Japanese artist Tomita well known for the Cosmos album, released the Bermuda Triangle Album. It has a segment of data in it. It sounds like you could recover it with a Bell 103 compatible modem. I never tried to recover the data. Some day I may give it a try. The Album is 12 inch and pressed in coral pink vinyl. It's a collectors item if you can get one.

John Logie Baird

[maharg]

John Logie Baird recorded 30 line video onto 78rpm records in 1928. He also demonstrated a 600 line HDTV colour system in 1941.

See http://www.answers.com/topic/john-logie-baird [answers.com]

There's nothing new under the sun !

Re:Increasing amount of data.

[Foobar of Borg]

Well, there used to be video phonographs back before Betamax came out. It was so neat because you could actually play theatre-released movies in your own house when you wanted! And, of course, the record buying clubs added a video section for video phonographs.

I think the parent poster is right about the lighter grooves, both from a logical standpoint and by the fact that the video phonographs came in special plastic containers so that you were not able to touch the actual medium. If you did, the medium would be ruined. Also, I wonder what they plan to do about scratches. Even the video phonographs would develop scratches and skip after a while. This is merely a nuisance when you are watching a movie, but would totally fubar any digital file, especially an executable.

Anyway, I don't think this is a particularly ingenious idea since it has been done before with video. The only real difference is that they are encoding the electrical signals differently so that 1's and 0's are recognized in a specific digital data framework.

Re:don't play it backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad to say, the 6502 IS dead. As opposed to a number of 8-bit architectures from the 70's that are still alive&kicking.
The Z80 survived in form of the quite popular Rabbit microcontroller
The 6800 and 68000 architectures are still being used by Motorola (Freescale) microcontrollers, and the 8051 is still around and growing since 1976.

Why did the the 6502 so completely die? During the 80's there was a large number of 6502 programmers around (Apple II, C64), but I have never seen the 6502 being recycled for anything.