page_title: Unusual types of gramophone records
section_title: Unusual materials and uses
hierarchical_section_title: Unusual types of gramophone records / Unusual materials and uses
caption_attribution_description: English: A Floppy-ROM vinyl record in the May 1977 issue of Interface Age magazine. The 6 minutes of audio held Robert Uiterwyk's 4K BASIC in the Kansas City Standard format. The program was for a 6800 microprocessor system such as the SWTPC 6800. Magazine provided by Robert Uiterwyk. Photo by Michael Holley, 22:04, 18 November 2005. The record is an Evatone sound sheet, invented by Richard Evans in 1962. They were produced until 2000. The sound sheets were often delivered in magazines. This image shows the mechanical properties of binding a record into a magazine. Español: Grabación en vinilo Floppy-ROM incluido en el número de Mayo 1977 del magazine Interface Age. Los 6 minutos de audio almacenan el intérprete BASIC de 4 K escrito por Robert Uiterwyk para ordenadores con microprocesador 6800 como el SWTPC 6800. Revista proporcionada por Robert Uiterwyk. Foto realizada por Michael Holley en 22:04, 18 November 2005.
context_page_description: The overwhelming majority of records manufactured have been of certain sizes, playback speeds, and appearance. However, since the commercial adoption of the gramophone record, a wide variety of records have also been produced that do not fall into these categories, and they have served a variety of purposes.
context_section_description: With their origin stretching back to the dawn of recorded sound at the turn of the 20th century, flexible recording media have been made from a variety of materials including foil, paper, and–in the 1950s–thin flexible vinyl known as flexi discs.
  Thin, flexible paper-based records were briefly popularized in the 1930s by Hit of the Week Records and Durium Records. "Melody Cards" were popular in the late 1950s. They took the form of an oversized rectangular postcard with the usual address and greeting space on one side and an illustration on the other. The illustration was overlaid with a transparent plastic material into which the grooving was impressed. The recording was usually musical as the name implies. They typically played at 45 RPM. It was recommended to not write on them with a ball point pen, an invention which was just coming into common use at that time. Laminated cardboard records have been produced as integral promotional novelties on packaging, most notably on the backs of cereal boxes in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
  Beginning in the 1940s, flexible records began to be used in the form of "book records"–spiral bound paper publications and four or five flexible record sheets bound in. A spindle hole went through the entire assembly. Book records could be opened to one of the records and completely folded back around itself, so that the whole thing could be placed on the turntable and played intact.
  In the 1950s, advances in vinyl production technology led to the development of the 7-inch 33​¹⁄₃ RPM flexi disc record. Only seen occasionally in the 1950s, these recordings were increasingly used as inserts in magazines that included audio supplements from the 1960s through the 1980s. The recordings were pressed on very thin, flexible sheets of vinyl (or laminated paper), providing a mixture of economy, practical utility and novelty appeal. Flexi discs or Soundsheets were often provided by music publishers to their customers, frequently school band and orchestra directors, marching band and drum corps leaders and others, with their printed catalogs of sheet music. The director could then hear a sample recording of the piece as they looked at an excerpt from the musical score.
  In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when computer programs and other binary data were often stored on audio cassettes, a number of microcomputer hobbyist magazines published "flexible program sheets" under various trademarked names including "Floppy ROM", "Flexisoft", and "Discoflex". These bound-in thin plastic 33​¹⁄₃ RPM audio recordings stored computer data such as video game programs that would be played on a turntable and dubbed onto a cassette. It was also possible to connect the record player's output to the computer's cassette (analog signal) input port and load the data into the computer directly. This method of storing computer data later expanded to include non-flexi-disc novelty releases from musicians such as Chris Sievey.
  Chocolate records about three inches in diameter, and small players made for them, were marketed as a novelty in Europe in 1903–1904. After a record wore out or ceased to amuse, it could be eaten.
  In 1973, the Kingdom of Bhutan issued several unusual postage stamps that are playable miniature phonograph records. These thin plastic single-sided adhesive-backed 33​¹⁄₃ RPM discs feature folk music and tourism information. Not very practical for actual postal use and rarely seen canceled, they were designed as revenue-generating novelties and were initially scorned as such by most stamp collectors. Their small diameters (approximately 7 and 10 cm or 2.75 and 4 inches) make them unplayable on turntables with automatic return tonearms.
  In the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1960s, bootleg copies of banned Western music were individually recorded onto used medical x-ray film and sold on the black market. These were called "ribs" or 'Roentgenizdat'.
caption: Flexi disc program sheets such as the Interface Age "Floppy ROM" were distributed by computer hobbyist and video game magazines during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
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