Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record

Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by mrweasel on Friday January 23, 2026 @07:47AM (#46731835)

Old scanners where SCSI, which made me wonder if you could use them as boot devices, if you could stuff the scanner driver and OCR software into the BIOS. Might be easier now that we have uEFI.

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by hackomorespacko on Friday January 23, 2026 @08:59AM (#46732550)

*were

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by dang on Friday January 23, 2026 @04:42PM (#46738333)

Thanks, I've taken the liberty of fixing the typo. (GP used to say "old scanners where SCSI")

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by estimator7292 on Friday January 23, 2026 @11:00AM (#46734042)

Even older scanners were raw ISA piped over a centronix cable

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by bobmcnamara on Friday January 23, 2026 @11:16AM (#46734274)

Forth it up on a middle aged PowerPC Mac!

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by yesturi on Friday January 23, 2026 @11:34AM (#46734487)

That is ridiculously fantastic idea!

Shame I used to have an SCSI scanner but I already disassembled it for parts.

One can write a simple bootloader, which reads bytes printed on a paper sheet to memory then boots it. Something like: black (0), white (1) or long rectangle (1), short rectangle (0). Wonder about the storage capacity of the A4 paper.

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by ddingus on Friday January 23, 2026 @03:46PM (#46737674)

Use some finer pitch graph paper and people could author "boot sector code" by literally coloring in the little squares with the necessary bits!

Would be sort of like paper tape.

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by nxobject on Friday January 23, 2026 @06:33PM (#46739422)

Pepperidge Farm remembers when high-school computing classes used Scantron-style optical mark cards...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HP_Educational_Basic...

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by ddingus on Thursday January 29, 2026 @02:09PM (#46814973)

Cool! My school used a variation of these for a while.

scantron... a name rising from the mists of time, lol

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by ddingus on Friday January 23, 2026 @03:44PM (#46737657)

Someone needs to give this a go!

Fantastic IDEA seconded!

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by sandworm101 on Friday January 23, 2026 @11:21PM (#46741022)

OCR? Just have it read out binary. Then it can boot by looking at a punchcard.... or a lot of them.

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by romforth on Saturday January 24, 2026 @11:02AM (#46744691)

This one boots from the parallel port: https://github.com/climatex/BootLPT (more details here https://boginjr.com/it/sw/dev/bootlpt-86/)

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Re:Booting a PC from a Vinyl Record by burnt-resistor on Sunday January 25, 2026 @07:46AM (#46753659)

Not all old scanners were just SCSI; there parallel port and proprietary adapter card scanners too.

Some cameras and printers also had SCSI interfaces: Opex MPS-40 mail sorting camera and NeXT Color Ink Jet SCSI.

And don't forget SCSI network adapters (NICs).

I'm wondering if there were a SCSI mouse and/or a SCSI to RS-232 adapter.

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