Quarantine seems to give generous time for experimentation. Like this computer engineer who ran MS-DOS from a vinyl record.
If you are old enough you will surely remember with nostalgia the days when you were uploading programs to Spectrum through a tape recorder. Audio from the beginning of computers was a medium of data transmission.
The Slovak engineer Jozef Bogin in the midst of quarantine probably the tereyein. So what he did was boot into MS-DOS, but instead of using a traditional tape, he decided to try a vinyl record.
In the video below you will see in detail all the steps, but we should warn you that it is recommended to turn down the volume of your speakers, as the sounds that are heard are piercing. Users of 80's machines certainly know.
As you can see, MS-DOS does not boot on a modern computer, αλλά σε ένα πρωτότυπο IBM 5150. Η procedure audio loading is actually surprisingly fast as MS-DOS 6.22 is rather small in volume.
According to Bogin's website there is a small ROM boot loader on the computer that handles the computer's built-in "cassette interface" and invokes the BIOS if all other boot options fail, e.g. floppy disk and hard disk.
The turntable spins and reads an analog record of a small RAM unit, which is 64K in size. Contains a FreeDOS kernel, modified by Bogin to reduce bulk, a micro variant of COMMAND.COM, and an updated version of INTERLNK, which allows the transport αρχείων μέσω καλωδίου εκτυπωτή, τροποποιημένη ώστε να μπορεί να εκτελεστεί στο FreeDOS. Ο bootloader διαβάζει την εικόνα του δίσκου από την εγγραφή ήχου μέσω του μόντεμ κασέτας, το φορτώνει στη μνήμη και εκκινεί το σύστημα σε αυτό.
While this may sound like rocket science to some, it is actually an experiment that could keep you busy in quarantine. Of course, there is no benefit other than having fun with the software and the satisfaction of getting it done.
If you want to try it at home, Bogin gives all the instructions through his website. Good luck!!
