10th Anniversary of Quicktime

An anonymous reader submitted a story about the 10th anniversary of QuickTime which might not seem like such a big deal unless you set your mental wayback machine to 1991 and remember what we didn't have back then. Bits from Brian Eno and others. Worth reading.

Comments

An Article With Real Substance^H^H^H^H^H Bullshit

[Lethyos]

``The amazing thing about Quicktime is that there was nothing like it before, and everything has been like it since,'' notes PBS commentator Robert X. Cringley. ``Look at the guts of Real Player or Windows Media Player, and you'll see structural copies of QuickTime.''

Aside from the overblown technological utopianism in this article that would make Theodore Roszak (The Cult of Information) physically ill, we have this man's opinion. Robert X. Cringley, self declared cyber evangelist telling us that QuickTime is the end-all, be-all of ALL multimedia formats. Aside from the fact that he's always prone to blow things out of proportion, Cringley has very little technical knowledge, let alone an understanding of software strucutre (or "guts" as he puts it). (Note he completely ignores that most features found in QuickTime today such as streaming capability and portal functionality were derived from RealMedia's software.) Oh yes, QuickTime has brought about a revolution in digital media! It brought democracy to the web! And nobody has ever duplicated it or surpassed it since! Nonsense.

This is all just foolishness and people need to calm down. It's a media format wrapper (not a codec like MPEG as most of these Slashfools are contending). That's all. QuickTime didn't start a revolution. It didn't change the world. And it certainly isn't the greatest thing in multimedia today. Similar technologies were being developed by a number of groups at the same time and we have equivalent if not better tools for producing and converging digital media today.