Slashdot Mirror
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."
that we'll start getting floppy 45's in magazines again?
if you want people to think you know what you are talking about, just put ".com" at the end of everything you say.com
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.
when copyright infringement of computer games could be done with a double cassette deck.
Some good decks could even reliably copy games in high speed dubbing mode.
Whoohoo!
if you play it backwards you can briefly hear a voice say "6502 is dead"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Basicode (Hobbyscoop) was distributed on flexi discs..
Real Men use eight tracks.
but I need to know before I buy - is the record DRM-laden ?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
...if you wrote DeCSS in this. Perhaps the MPAA and the RIAA would sue each other over who has the right to sue you, thus annihilating themselves into pure energy?
With great numbers come great responsibility!
that we'll start getting floppy 45's in magazines again?
AOL will of course be the first and largest user of this new medium.
* = $C000:.MEM
LDA #115
JSR $FFD2
LDA #108
JSR $FFD2
LDA #097
JSR $FFD2
LDA #115
JSR $FFD2
LDA #104
JSR $FFD2
LDA #100
JSR $FFD2
LDA #111
JSR $FFD2
LDA #116
JSR $FFD2
SYS 49152
I wonder if slashdot has ever been output in 6502 assembly language before?
I'm a big tall mofo.
I've been joking about LP-ROMs for years :)
This page has data on various vinyl records with computer data stored on them. Most of which are about 20 years old. So they're not the first to distribute computer data on vinyl.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
This reminded me of this guys:
http://www.vinylvideo.com/
Was that a hoax or does it really work?
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...
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
OH DEAR.
a bat bit
you.
This is a cool idea aslong as you dont have public enemy over to have cucumber sandwiches too often, i can imagine that Terminator X and his scratching antics could cause some problems
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
This reminds me of the TI-99/4A's 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?
check out the album XL1 by Pete Shelley (ex-Buzzcocks). apart from being a great album,t m
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.h
cheers, lars
In the 80's, we had magazines that would include software on plastic 'vinyl' slip-ins that were bundled on the cover .. i used to have a whole collection of these mini-records, full of software from the magazine ..
;)
nice idea, though, to be mixing up assembly and music. take that, miss spears!!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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.
When I worked on Commodore User (UK mag) in the 80s, we gave away a flexi-disc as a covermount. It was basically a floppy plastic record. One side was a Heaven 17 track and the other, IIRC, was a datatrack designed to be recorded onto tape then loaded on a C64.
Rainbow Magazine used to ship with a floppy record every once in a while.
It had the same code on it that was listed in the magazine in text, but the record came without the typing and type-o-ing.
Rainbow Magazine was a magazine with content based around the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer.
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
and the C64 was oh-so-popular, the local radio station used to send freeware C64 programs over radio so you could record them on a tape and use with your Commodore. It was good listening also, if you happened to like industrial/noise.
Cheers,
Ian
Now the question is, if you don't have a gramophone, can you read the data with a scanner?
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Great. Now who makes A/V software for my turntable?
If you Listen To TFA, you'll realise that this isn't just software written to vinyl, this is software encoded in music, that happens to be written to vinyl. That is, the assembly code, when played back, actually SOUNDS like music. This is completely different from having a data section at the end of a vinyl disc (for all of you who have been using that as a "this has been done before with..." example).
'tho listening to some Speedy-J tracks, sounds like there some data encoded in those!
-2A
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
back in 1975/1975, a copy of 6800 BASIC ..p
was put on a flexible record, and bound
into Interface Age magazine. You had
to play it, record it to cassette, and
load it in the machine.
If you really wanted to, you could probably encode music onto a piece of cheese...but what's the point?
A story like this should have been posted later in the day.... I woke up, went to slashdot, read the story and for a brief second thought the last 25 years of my life had been some type of twisted dream and that I was late for school. Gee thanks guys.... I nearly had a heart attack ;)
There was a Monty Python Album with 3 groves.
http://www.eeggs.com/items/2874.html
During the early computing days a few magazines gave away flexi-discs (records to us laymen) that had software on them. Reason was that distribution/pressing of flexi-disc records was way way cheaper than attaching a cassette tothe magazine. These that I have date back to 1981. One nice one has VIC-20, ZX81 and some PET software on the disc, also believe has track for Dragon micro but been a long long time since i dug them out. Today we have the great cover CD's (which are about as cheap to make as flexi-discs were back then), though CD's do fly alot lot further @:_).
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.
-><- no
"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.
This msg is brought to you by the letter 'W'.. for Worthless Wuss
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
There's nothing new under the sun !
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
"The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand", or so I have read.
...Of course, there are many of us who truly believe the quality of software distributed by Vinyl, will always be higher than that distributed by CD-ROM.
bell labs did it with a gold disc during WW2
hi folks
thanks for the debate on our record, hope someone likes the music anyway. obviously not the first data on vinyl [just never bothered to change the webpage in 5 years] and actually not the first time the 8-bit construction set has been slashdotted. but nonetheless it's always a pleasure to see what people think.
we received an anonymous and very interesting email in early 2002 detailing some patents regarding software distribution on vinyl. i'm appending it below for interested parties.
thanks again
& peace out nerds
paul
paul AT beigerecords DOT com
*****
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 23:59:03 -0500
Distribution of computer programs on vinyl records
was done in the early 70's by several different
researchers. First, a guy named
Allan B. Chertok. He has several patents in this field,
which I would recommend that you guys read:
US Patent 3,662,350 (1972)
US Patent 3,740,733 (1973)
US Patent 3,662,354 (1972)
Also- Norman L. Harvey. This guys was a real genius.
Check out his patent: US 3,755,792 (1973).
This is not to say that your work is not "original"
and "cool". But please- give credit where credit is due!
*****
That's nothing. We used clay tablets to record our binary. It really sucked if you spilled water on your programs and they would just turn into a pile of mud. We transmitted these programs using huge drums made out of mammoth hide which would boom the code out across the frozen hills. You'd sit in your cave (where the cave walls amplified the transmissions) and copy the code down onto your mud tablet and then set it by the fire to dry. Sometimes when you were gathering the mud it would get stuff in it like spiders and ants and you'd have to pick them out and then they'd sting you; and that's how we invented debugging. And once our code got dry we sat around and got really depressed because computers hadn't been invented yet. So we'd go outside and trudge uphill through the snow for six miles. We didn't even trudge to school uphill six miles, because school hadn't been invented yet. We just trudged because that's all there was to do to keep your mind off the fact that computers didn't exist. We once tried to invent a computer. We got a mammoth skull and figured the hardware would go inside the skull and the big hole in the skull where the trunk came out could hold the display, so it would be an all-in-one form factor. But then we didn't get much further than that. We couldn't decide whether to use mud, or sticks, or flint for the CPU. Vinyl disks? You modern, post ice-age geeks just don't know how good you have it.
Most of them! One groove for each of two sides.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?