http://boginjr.com/it/sw/dev/vinyl-boot/
"Most PCs tend to boot from a primary media storage, be it a hard disk
drive, or a solid-state drive, perhaps from a network, or – if all else
fails – the USB stick or the boot DVD comes to the rescue… Fun, eh?
Boring! Why don’t we try to boot from a record player for a change?
So this nutty little experiment connects a PC, or an IBM PC to be exact,
directly onto a record player through an amplifier. There is a small ROM
boot loader that operates the built-in “cassette interface” of the PC
(that was hardly ever used), invoked by the BIOS if all the other boot
options fail, i.e. floppy disk and the hard drive. The turntable spins
an analog recording of a small bootable read-only RAM drive, which is
64K in size. This contains a FreeDOS kernel, modified by me to cram it
into the memory constraint, a micro variant of COMMAND.COM and a patched
version of INTERLNK, that allows file transfer through a printer cable,
modified to be runnable on FreeDOS. The bootloader reads the disk image
from the audio recording through the cassette modem, loads it to memory
and boots the system on it. Simple huh?"
Via Esther Schindler, who wrote "What fun!"
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
