from the time-to-start-looking-at-your-vinyl-again dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
How often do you find Easter eggs in old vinyl records?
It sure was a surprise for [Robin Harbron] when he learned about a Commodore 64 program hidden on one of the sides of a record from the 1985 album of Christian rock band Prodigal. The host of the YouTube channel 8-Bit Show and Tell shows the “C-64” etching on one side of the vinyl, which he picked up after finding out online that the record contained the hidden program.
[...] Recording the audio onto a cassette and loading it onto a dataset reveals a short C64 program. The process is a little more troublesome that that, but after a few tries [Harbron] reveals a secret message, courtesy of Albert Einstein and Jesus Christ. It’s not the most impressive program ever written, but it’s pretty cool that programmers 35 years ago were able to fit it into only a few seconds of audio.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @05:54AM (6 children)
Turns out the Christians are the ones embedding secret messages in their music ;)
(Score: 5, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:00AM (1 child)
Yeah, and if you play the easter egg audio in reverse, you get a satanist ZX81 program.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday November 26 2019, @12:10PM
And if you load it while paused, it becomes an atheistic program for the Dick Smith computer. :P
Warning: This contains material on religion. Religion is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, critically considered, and then flushed down the toilet.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday November 26 2019, @09:53AM (1 child)
My favorite was Stryper back masking "If you're so in to God, why are you looking for the Devil?"
That was right in the middle of the back masking moral panic.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 26 2019, @03:10PM
My favorite was back masking [youtube.com] by the 80s Christian group Petra: "What are you looking for the devil for when you ought to be looking for the Lord".
That is right before the song begins. It's very brief. I heard it so many times. I was too young and hyper-focused on computers. Eventually it dawned on me that what I was hearing was backward audio of a voice. I used cassettes, but also had albums. I put the record on turntable in neutral, and manually spun it backward to hear the audio. Had to do it several times to make out what it was saying.
List of backmasked messages [wikipedia.org]
Press any key to save and continue, or any other key to exit without saving.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Bot on Tuesday November 26 2019, @11:13AM (1 child)
Secret? that's pretty intellegible frequency modulated signals. It's more trouble to decode Pink Floyd's ramblings. Not to mention Bowie.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Tuesday November 26 2019, @08:22PM
Pink Floyd used DTMF encoding. That can be used as-is, directly into the phone.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:10AM (6 children)
Amazing that this program was recovered after so many years.
What's even more amazing is that it was recovered at all, because let's face it: it would be a minor miracle that anyone would notice it on a Rick Astley record. But who the hell collects obscure eighties christian rock vinyls *and* actually pulls them out of the cover and listens to them???
(Score: 5, Touché) by MostCynical on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:20AM (1 child)
..apparently, people with a working commodore 64, and a working tape drive and a working tape recorder
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @12:40PM
They're never gonna give them up!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 26 2019, @03:16PM (2 children)
I have a stack, about, I'd say, 3-4 inches high of them still sealed in original cellophane wrapping. At this point, I have no intention of ever opening them in my lifetime. All Christian. Not all are rock. Some are ancient Amy Grant, and other early 80's.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Tuesday November 26 2019, @04:15PM
See for example this discussion: "Cellophane - the silent killer?" https://www.discogs.com/forum/thread/368434 [discogs.com]
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_and_restoration_of_vinyl_discs [wikipedia.org]
Good luck with your records whatever you do with them.
Wow. I really enjoyed this story -- having programmed with Commodore equipment after starting on a KIM-1. Nice to see new things about them in the news. There was an understandability all the way down to the circuitry such computers had which most modern systems lack. And there were some nice things including immediacy and recoverability about working so close to the metal with a machine language monitor and an interrupt button.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 2) by TrentDavey on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:14PM
It's going to be difficult to open them after the end of your lifetime.
You'll be looking down from heaven, kicking yourself, watching your kids donate them to Goodwill.
...
(Or looking up from you know where.)
...
I'm glad I'm a Bright - my worldview contains no supernatural elements.
http://www.the-brights.net/ [the-brights.net]
(Score: 2) by progo on Tuesday November 26 2019, @09:45PM
I'd call it more of an amusing story than amazing.
It takes one person to notice hidden easter egg data after the "lead-out" groove, another person to recover enough to say "that sounds like a Commodore tape" -- there's plenty of overlap between microcomputer nerds and vynil collectors.
And a second or third person like this YouTube presenter is the one with all the software or working equipment to pull the data and write it to a form that a real Commodore computer or an emulator can execute, but he doesn't have to be the one to discover that the data exists.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Tuesday November 26 2019, @08:01AM
Thanks for posting, that was interesting!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @02:49PM
If you listen to Autobahn by Kraftwerk with the volume all the way up on studio speakers, you can hear a Tesla drive by in ludicrous mode.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @05:11PM
Inner City Unit "New Anatomy" 1984
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 27 2019, @01:58AM (1 child)
10 PRINT "JOHN 3:16"
20 GOTO 10
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 27 2019, @06:21PM
The last line of code...
666 GOTO PRINT $Hell
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 27 2019, @03:29AM (2 children)
300 8-N-1
@>---,---'----,-----
3 3 3 3
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday November 27 2019, @03:59PM (1 child)
For the diehard fans, I swear all of this is true!
I think I liked the comedic story on the P&L CD, more, though, even if the white roses made a good number of untrue geeks get off their chairs and visit the far corners of the internet like they should have been doing to begin with.
I also wish they had known they'd get an entire data CD for the DBA album. Some of their content was pretty fascinating to go through, and it's a shame they had put so much effort into trying to fit it all into what would be left on the audio disk only to find they were being provided a whole second disk just for their stuff...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 29 2019, @02:20AM
Can... you contextualize?