There are small runs of “lathe cut” releases out there. They typically don’t stand up to much use and wear out quickly.
From what I’ve gathered, the fire at Apollo Masters has not turned out to be as big a setback as people first thought.
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There were magazine with a cassette tape, that was more easy to use, and actually was a more streamlined method for publishers. There were music magazine with a cassette or language courses, so was easy to put a cassette. Only problem is that the duplication equipment was stereo, so with the c2n was sometimes a problem with the azimuth.
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White Nerd Zombie- More Hipster Than Hipster, aka, Revenge of The Nerds 22, Edison Boogaloo
This whole thing is quite possibly the needless thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
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The SelectaVision link appears to be broken, but I’d assume is this video:
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Yes! There was also a cable TV delivery service for Atari 2600 games. It never went anywhere, but I mention it anytime kids today talk about Xbox Live like it’s a new idea (right before asking them to please depart from my planted grass area)
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Finally, a track id from the Merzbow dj set
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You kids with your newfangled wax cylinders! We used to boot from stone tablets. Reading was hard enough, but writing took forever!
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i still can’t figure why we don’t have uds based radio yet
i have a shoebox of old computer cassettes, including my first (copied from byte magazine) program and some later amiga disks. i know there’s nothing on them any more. but i can pretend.
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The problem with distributing software on vinyl is that it’s far too easy for pirates to make copies.
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The backup software that everybody had, but no-one bought - because it really could copy anything.
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From 1978
The product is surprisingly cheap and tough. In manufacturing cost the price of the the disks approaches that of audio cassettes. 1.T.C., which has approximately 35 percent of the estimated $135 million floppy disk market — which it expects to see nse to $235 million by 1981 — sells the minifloppy disks in large quantities for $1.50. At these prices floppy disks have begun to compete with an item found in abundance in offices — paper. The secret lies in the tremendous quantities of information that can be magnetically recorded on the floppy disk’s surface —over a quarter‐million typewritten characters on today’s standard 8‐inch disk. Newer disks, which record at double the density of the old, and on both sides, have increased this capacity by a factor of four, making it possible to place no fewer than 300 pages of manuscript on a single $8 disk.
Maybe Canada had weird tariffs.
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They should try booting from a Devo record.
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I was going to make some witty report like “duh, why not just use a QR code”, then i read this! Crazy! How was it read?
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They were glorified barcode scanners, relying on infrared or visible-light-sensitive photoresistors. Both can be made to work. The data density was low because you need a lot of checksumming and tracking bits to handle being scanned by a moving human hand and on poorly printed magazine paper. It never really caught on either, but was a neat idea. Unlike a QR Code, which is a pointer to data, in this case the barcode is the data, because there was no internet to point you to.
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On my 6502 system it was often easier to code things from memory rather than load them from tape.
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Although QR codes are normally used as pointers to data, they don’t need to be. The UK covid app uses QR codes for each location that contain hundreds of bytes. For example this one is 277 bytes. I’ve no idea what data they’re storing in them. It kind of seems absurd to be so information dense when the whole system is online anyway.
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The online ones I have used all require me to register with a web form. Simple on a desktop but tedious on a phone and I have hardly used them.
I was thinking more specifically of the covid app, not links in general.
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Link in article points to DiscoVision aka laser disc which is an optical medium. I’d say that a better comparison for the vinyl DOS boot disk would be the CED ( Capacitance Electronic Disc) analog videodisc format that was championed by RCA under the Selectavision moniker. One of my friends owned a Zenith VP2000 & rented videodiscs by the score from Rochester’s Hill TV (home of the 5 year worry free warranty). Here’s one of their commercials from that era hawking the CED format: https://youtu.be/LWREBuZV7co
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