Slashdot Mirror
The Complete History of Format Wars
TheFrozenSink writes "The UK bit of Cnet have put up an article on old formats that should have won their respective format wars. The piece makes some pretty spectacular claims, like if Apple had bought BeOS then there would have been no iPod and of course, no iPhone.
The article also claims that the Atari ST was better than the Amiga and that MiniDisc should have won over CD."
No way. The CD is superior to the minidisc in every way with the execpetion of size. There have even been several audio tests where people picked cassette tapes with Dolby S noise reduction over minidiscs.
Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Minidisk was having a format war with Philips Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) which it easily won, despite having a higher compression ratio. Compression on minidisc is about 10x higher compared to CD and even I can hear it.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
The MD failed because it was yet another proprietary Sony format which offered too little too late, especially as the CD market was already well established. MDs may have had a place in portable media but soon after they started gaining traction MP3 players saw to that.
Horrible^2.
We had two minidisk players in a studio, and always, always always when you put a minidisc recorded on the left player into the right player, the TOC would be messed up, and the disk became unreadable in both.
Then, the MD's had to be sent to Sony, who recreated a TOC, but without any of the titles, or other data.
In other words, MD was crap besides the compression algorithm of which I will not speak here.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
It doesn't really say that the ST is better than the Amiga, just that the Amiga was more successful for a time. Anyway, I programmed for the ST for several years... the Amiga was much cooler.
Anyway, it's a ridiculous article. He doesn't address the numerous problems with 8-track tapes (such as their tendency to seize up and that many were made with a mid-song track switch), just that you don't have to (and can't) rewind them.
Mod article troll!
No, seriously, though, who knows what Apple would have done if it had bought Be or BeOS? And stating that the Atari ST is better than the Amiga -- well, that claim is specious at best. The Amiga was wayyyy ahead of its time -- it had separate graphics, sound and I/O processors and made use of DSPs years before the equivalent began showing up in 'IBM-compatibles' and Macs.
But then again, these arguments are old and tired. What's next? An article on Editor Wars? vi! No, Emacs! Ha! Real men use ed!
My blog
What a load of rubbish.
Atari even knew it was crap, by calling its operating system "TOS" !!!!!! and then its Multitasking OS as MultiTOS !!!
Thanks for the heads up.
Obvously the article is written by a drooling moron. No need to waste time on this.
so not many /.ers will read it.
My executive summary is that it takes one obvious (Betamax/VHS) and nine other pretty random examples and explains why market forces will usually prevail over arguable technical excellence. Life's like that, get over it.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
...it came with midi, Cubase, and that dinky little high-res greyscale monitor...
Obviously light-hearted but the reasons they give require you to swallow a number of suppressed premises, i.e. that all of these formats were superior if you forgive what turned out to be a *crippling* flaw.
e.g. in Betamax the 60 minute limitation seems a good candidate. I get really irritated when I find one of my non-LP VHS tapes and it only lasts 180. 3 hours just flies by these days!
Laserdiscs were very nice but far too expensive.
As to SACDs I think the dominance of the horribly compressed mp3 format in today's market tells you all you need to know about how much consumers care about sound quality. What, after all, is the point in making beautifully high-quality audio if someone's listening to it on a 10W Akai minisystem or some cheapo portable music player?
I for one welcome our new Betamax overlords. Long live Betamax!
Oh, wait...
This sig left intentionally blank.
10 pages, each with an illustration larger than the text and of course a lot of advertisements.
From the article: The key to getting the Atari into the mainstream would have been more games...
Err...no. No, the problem was that is was seen purely as a games machine by the mainstream, not as the decent workhorse it actually was. And at gaming, it lost to the Amiga hands down.
His other points about the system are hit and miss. It was the musicians' machine of choice, true. It was the CAD users' machine of choice? Not really, no. It could have been, but it wasn't. The hardware was there, the nice "hi-res" (for 1985/86!) mono monitor was excellent, it had a faster clockspeed than its other 68000-based rivals and utterly outstripped the frankly miserable x86 line of that time, but even so there were attributes of the system that meant it just wasn't going to win. Those attributes were often chosen to cut costs (the awful keyboard for instance) and the costs were being cut because the machine was primarily seen by the market as being for games.
I owned an ST. For years it remained the most productive system I ever owned, running its own code, Mac code via Spectre GCR and PC code via a hardware 286 emulator (ATSpeed or Vortex - not sure I remember which one I used). With Protex, Signum, Calamus and Steinberg 12 it made for a superb home system. But to say it failed to dominate the mainstream due to lack of games? That's just madness.
Cheers,
Ian
Now get the hell off my lawn...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
The Atari ST had MIDI ports. That was what made it stand out for musicians. There really wasn't enough development of it to justify its continued existence.
The minidisc suffered from entering a market saturated with a format that was superior in several ways and didn't offer sufficient advantages over the other recordable medium (compact cassette) to justify its price tag.
If Steve Jobs hadn't gone back to Apple, Creative would probably have dominated the mp3 player market.
8-track was abysmal. You could get bleeding from the other tracks, the tapes were unweildy and thre was a break in the music at the tape splice. On the plus side you uhmmmm didn't need to rewind them.
How many more years until UMD gets added to this list?
Then again, you can't really call it a "Format War" since UMD is just uniquely sucky regardless of what you compare it to.
"I once preached peaceful coexistence with Windows. You may laugh at my expense - I deserve it."
-- Jean-Louis Gassée, CEO Be, Inc.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Laserdisc??? What about the fact that you have to flip the disc in the middle of a movie? I mean some real expensive players had 2 heads so you only got a little glitch during the switch over, but come'on... but hey, i still sometimes pull out some LD porn...
I think every example in this article is absolutely accurate. But then again, I'm posting this from a parallel universe on my Commodore 1024 running OS/2 XP in the Confederate States of America.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Every single one of these format wars is between two formats that were, in fact, reasonable comparable. This is all war stories and middle-aged nostalgia. As Pete Seeger put it (in his added stanza to "Both Sides, Now") "Something's lost and something's gained in living every day."
Each of the defeated formats had some nice stuff about it, but it's not as if there was anything so terrible about their passing, other than angst for those who bought into the orphaned formats. Some of his comments are just weird. For example, he praises 8-track tapes basically because of its being marginally easier to find individual songs on them... which is true only if you're comparing it to cassettes, not to CDs.
Yeahyeahyeah and what's more a B24 Liberator was soooo much better than a B17 Flying Fortress, the U. S. should have adopted PAL instead of NTSC, and a Pickett and Eckel slide rule was way better than a Keuffel and Esser.
I mean, it's not like Cinerama. Cinerama was great, so much better than CInemaScope or IMAX or any of the other wide-screen processes, and it just blew away anything you think you've seen on HDTV. Cinerama really mattered. The world would actually have been a better place if CInerama had won the format wars. In all likelihood, if only Cinerama had survived, movies would be better, the Beatles would never have broken up, and the Arabs and Israelis would have put aside their differences, united by the joy of watching widescreen movies.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I just hate those multipage articles.. Aaaaargh!! No wonder no one on Slashdot reads the fucking articles if they are presented in such a dim-witted manner!
Lets see...
"The copy protection is good too, which means less of that pesky piracy the music industry keeps banging on about." - From the SACD/DVD-Audio page.
Oh yeah, everybody wants that. The only SACD player I ever saw didn't have a digital output, apparently because the standard didn't allow it due to copy fears. You had to connect a block of six analog outputs. Genius!
"Later on, further innovation came with the NetMD range, which allowed you to copy music on your computer to a MiniDisc at high speeds. MP3s would be transcoded in Sony's ATRAC format before being copied over to the MD recorder, and it was possible to use long-play modes to squeeze even more music on to the diminutive discs."
The transcoding sure wasn't high-speed on most computers of the day, compared to simply copying a CD.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I guess that the author never actually used any of these things, as some of the fact or impressions are a bit off.
First of all, the 8-track was a -terrible- design. Having the 4 channels run physically parallel on the tape led to awful tracking and crosstalk problems. Also, the way that the tape feed operated was awful. As the tape played, it would be peeled out from the center of the tape spindle, run over the head, and then reeled back onto the spindle. This horrible way of feeding the tabe resulted in tangling, unravelling, and twisting. It also contributed to wear and tear on the tape and shortened the cartridge's life.
I didn't see any place where they compared the Atari ST to the Amiga. I only saw the passing reference to Amiga as an "also ran." Although both of these machines had their RAM configured as 8-bit or 16-bit, both operated on a 32-bit model. It didn't matter, since the MC68000 had a linear memory model. Either one was a joy to use. I learned MC68000 Assembly on the Amiga. IMHO, the Amiga was more advanced, though the Atari was faster. And in spite of their brand differences, a lot of the same people designed the multimedia capabilities of both. In speed and capability, these boxes were remarkably similar.
By the way, TOS was, maybe unofficially, the "Tramiel Operating System." AmigaDOS was fun, somewhere between DOS and Unix. Maybe more like MP/M.
The BeOs claim sounds reasonable. It _was_ a much better OS than anything available at the time, except for NeXTStep. However, most of the rest of his claims miss the mark.
He gets it badly wrong in the VHS vs. Beta war. I was around. I remember clearly why VHS won -- you could record 4 hours on one VHS tape, whereas you could only record 1 hour on a comparably priced Beta tape. Sony fixed that eventually by adding Beta II, but by that time, VHS had added the SLP speed for 6 hour recording. Blank videotapes cost $30 each back in 1978, so it really mattered if you could record 4 TV shows, or just one, on a single videotape. That killed Beta and they never were able to catch up.
The Atari ST was a great machine. Shoot, I still own one. I even still use it. But the IBM PC and the Mac both had hugely popular killer apps (Lotus 1-2-3 for the PC, Pagemaker for the Mac) and the Atari ST never came up with a comparably popular killer app. The Atari ST boasted many fine apps, but they were always johnny-come-latelies churned out after the Mac or the PC scored a huge monster hit with some new application like PhotoShop. Ultimately, the ST never had a large enough developer community or a big enough user base to score a huge killer app. Also, the ST was always aclosed box -- you could never upgrade it. After 1987 the Mac changed to an open box and you could upgrade it with new video cards, more memory, etc., etc. With the ST, you bought a closed box and couldn't change it easily. (Ever try to install a 4 MB upgrade in a stock ST? Non trivial.)
8 track had a bunch of problems. The rumble, the wow and flutter, and worst of all, you had to FF through the whole bloody tape to get to the part you wanted.
MiniDisc, as everyone has noted, had rotten sound quality. Sony's ATRAC codec was initially very bad. It improved, but never anywhere near enough to compete with, say, LAME's mp3 encoding. CD remains the king for great sound quality. Nothing beats uncompressed 16 bit linear PCM.
Hi-def audio failed not because of format wars, but because no human can hear a difference between 24 bit 192 khz sampled hi-def audio and 16 bit 44.1 khz sampled audio. Double blind testing shows that listeners just can't hear any difference. A well-dithered modern CD playing 16-bit 44.khz sampled audio sounds as good as it gets. Bats may be able to hear a difference between that 20 khz rolloff and the 80 khz rolloff of hi-def audio, but humans can't.
I'm inclined to agree with him about laserdisc. Great format. I stil own a bunch of 'em and still play 'em. There's minor analog noise visible in the background by comparison with DVDs, but overall, laserdisc looks incredibly good -- worlds better than VHS or Beta. BTW, I've never been able to see a difference twixt Beta and VHS on an ordinary consumer SD TV set. On a studio TV monitor, yes, there's slight visible difference, but not on consumer televisions.
That's British humour
You know what I miss? Leeches.
The guy who founded Apple and started the wave of personal copmuters is not a nobody.
Irony
TFA is ludicrously positive about the 8-track. In practice, this is one format that deserved to die a quick death. The 'endless loop' cassette format meant that 8-track was very susceptible to jamming, and that the tape wore down rather quickly. It also makes fast-forwarding difficult, and rewinding impossible. Incredibly, TFA tries to sell this as an advantage.
Also, the cassettes were large and unwieldy. Had 8-track been the dominant format, the Walkman wouldn't have happened.
No, for once, this was a format war that ended as it should, with the superior format (Philips Compact Cassette) wiping out all competition.
It does. In fact they're really just listing the POSITIVE traits for any failed technologies, and ignoring the negatives. However, the ones listed in the summary aren't spectacular at all.
If Apple bought BeOS, instead of NEXT, they wouldn't have gotten Steve Jobs back in the deal. Certainly, that would have meant huge changes. Even if they still introduced the iMac and iPods, they certainly would have been far different from how we know them.
They justify that quite well... Atari ST had better musical capabilities, was the first system with 1MB of RAM under $1,000, and had higher resolution than it's competitors. Obviously a matter of opinion, but it's not too spectacular a claim.
Can't argue with that. Better physical format, technologically light-years ahead of anything we have, even now, with a caddy to protect it and make it mind-numbingly easy to swap discs in the dark, over a million rewrite cycles, and based on Sony's extremely impressive billion dollar Magneto Optical technology. The audio quality of full bitrate ATRAC (v1/2) was as good as CD quality, Sony just fucked it up later on, reducing the bitrate to claim it could compete with MP3, rather than actually supporting MP3 or AAC files directly. The 1GB+ capacity of HD-MDs makes it likely they'd have done far better against MP3 players (like the iPod) than CDs have been able to, if not for Sony's mistakes.
Basically, it's EVERYTHING ELSE that Slashdot didn't quote, which was outlandish.
LaserDisc didn't have a snowball's chance in hell, thanks to it's size. Maybe if they'd waited a couple years, made the discs smaller with larger capacity, they could have been what DVD became, except without DRM.
8-tracks were a bitch, with albums having to be rearranged to fit, songs being split between channels (with a 5 second delay of silence in the middle), inherent weakness at the splice, large size, and no possible method of rewind. They were "neat" toys like anything else, but crap that I'm glad we're not stuck with.
HD-Audio failed because CDs reach the upper limit of human hearing to begin with, and surround-sound channels aren't much of an upgrade.
DTS isn't any better than AC3 by any stretch of the imagination. At any bitrate, compare the two, and AC3 will come out on top. It's companies with stock in DTS degrading the AC3 audio on DVDs that gives the idiotic perception otherwise. As for film, the DTS idea of syncing a CD was a good once, but could have been pulled off with any other audio format just as easily... Make that work with AC3, and maybe you'll get your multiple language reels.
BeOS had it's strong points over other OSes, but so did NEXT... Many more the latter than the former. How often did you even want to play 8 MPEG streams simultaneously on a 1995 era PC?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The Atari ST WAS better than the Amiga, although not for gaming. I used to design full page ads and Yellow Pages ads on the ST, some of those ads costing $6000-$13000 each to place. A comparable PC to do the same job would have cost many, many thousands of dollars. (Just for comparison, two years later I was selling 386DX20 machines for $8000 each.)
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
This article is a bad joke. The comparisons show an incomplete/misinformed knowledge of computing history.
Other than the fact that he favors everything that Sony made, he missed out on what happened: Most everyone loves things that are readily accessible, not something they have to go find.
Minidisc - 'Better' compression, but we all had CDs at this point. No incentive for the average consumer to change.
Laserdisc - Just too expensive to the average consumer, need I say more?
Betamax - VHS became more readily available to the consumer, and so the consumer adopted it, plus the players were cheaper.
Seems like the guy is wining that the proprietary hardware didn't win out...Or he just bought everything he thought should win, and lost out. I wonder if he's still watching his movies by Laserdisc player.
Why is DTS even on this list?
So much bad information. Where to begin? ...
1) MiniDisc was never intended to replace audio CDs. It was intended to replace audio tapes . Yes, certainly Sony mismanaged the format, but what killed it mostly was the availability of small, portable CD players and the eventual availability of cheap CD burners and burnable discs.
2) DTS lost, sort of, but since a rather large number of DVDs have DTS soundtracks, it's not a terrible loss as DTS is still in business. Plus, it's not entirely correct to say that DTS uses "fractionally more space on a disc" unless 100 to 400% more meets your idea of "fractionally more". However, given the size of dual-layer DVDs, it's sort of accurate in that there's enough space to put a DTS soundtrack out there on most movies if they don't have too many extras on the disc.
3) As far as high definition audio goes, it does still survive, although many don't know that. SACD was horribly bungled by Sony, again, who at first said that it was "impossible" (I believe that is an exact quote) to make hybrid SACD discs which would also play in normal audio CD players. Strangely, smaller independent labels managed to make such discs almost from the beginning of the format. Lack of product, price, and lack of hybrid discs on Sony owned labels had strongly negative impacts on the format. SACD still survives in classical, jazz and some European pop recordings.
DVD-Audio is still alive on some classical and jazz labels, but it's not doing well. The lack of compatibility with CD audio players seems to have really hurt it. While the Dolby AC-3 part of a DVD-Audio disc is easily rippable and convertible to audio CD format, most consumers don't know that and just viewed it as another incompatible format.
Surprised that they didn't add the PS3 to the list.
Boom boom.
Before you write a 9 paragraph essay claiming Atari was the best or Amiga was the best, let's look at the companies today.
Their both European held brands that have nothing to do with their origonal companies - except Atari. It's about to be delisted from NASDAQ. And perhaps Commodore because they're still not in American markets so they're dead to most of the origonal user base.
Apart from that - you can now slam your head against your monitor because it's now going to fill up with retro-flame wars that only applied to nerds in the late 80s.
Enjoy your flashback!
we had 1/2" EIAJ (and EIAJ-2) reel to reel videotape, and we liked it! Of course, there was 1" or 2" Quad that were better.... Hell, lets look at 3/4" (umatic) vs. VHS vs. Beta vs. Cartravision (hooray USA). The winner? UMATIC. Better resolution than VHS or Beta, more players than Cartravision, and it has been in use since (gasp....) 1974, and is still going strong.
But really, 8-track?
Toil is Stupid. Don't be Stupid.
Sounded like there was more going on, more details in the sound coming from behind me. This is compared to the Dolby soundtack on the same Extended Edition DVDs, listened to on fairly low-end consumer grade gear. The 5.1 speakers came in box together!
Blar.
1) Make article full of outrageous claims that will infuriate geeks
2) Put advertising on all ten pages, post link to Slashdot
3) Profit.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
re:"Also, the way that the tape feed operated was awful. As the tape played, it would be peeled out from the center of the tape spindle, run over the head, and then reeled back onto the spindle. This horrible way of feeding the tabe resulted in tangling, unravelling, and twisting. It also contributed to wear and tear on the tape and shortened the cartridge's life"
Then why do they project film-based movies this way?
(probably because the tape in 8 tracks was pulled by the tension on the tape and not by the rotating platter - but still - it's an effective method used today)
the very same author would have posted a near identical article.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Well, for all those slamming this article as a bunch of crap, bear in mind that this IS from a UK perspective where the 80's and 90's technological marketplaces were quite different from the US. These days, pretty much a wash except that the UK is still far ahead of the US in terms of cellphone tech.
:) The iPod would've killed it if it weren't already dead :D
Anyway, as an ex-pat myself I can say the following;
Laserdisc
Yes, it WAS a good format. Yes, it was a good technology. Yes, it was way too expensive. I think I knew one person with an LD player, and while the quality was really nice it was really not worth the incredible price premium for most users. There was also the fact that at the time, there was a certain "leeriness" about the scratch resistance of the discs themselves; remember this was a time when LP's and cassettes were the formats for music, way before CD's.
8 Track
Well, this is a subjective thing but the sound WAS better from 8-track than from a regular cassette. Well, dolby noise reduction reduced that advantage. Plus, the non-linear format of the tapes was both its saving grace and a factor in its downfall. How many 8-track tapes cut in the middle of a song to flip to the next track and continue playing?
HD Audio
I've got three letters for you; DRM. Yup, a great idea hobbled by DRM that rendered discs almost unusable. The record companies still haven't learned the lesson from that format failure. Personally, I loved it... and the quality was incredible.
Mini Disc
See HD Audio
BeOS
Good and powerful OS, hobbled by lack of developer support, lousy negotiation skills of the marketing folks and a general feeling from the company that "... we'll succeed because we're better, we don't need to sell it..." A bad attitude to have when your competition is Windows and Mac OS, or the increasingly (at the time) nimble Linux. I'd say Linux had a much bigger hand in BeOS' downfall than the article gives credit for; by the time BeOS was commercially viable, Linux already had many of its advantages with the EXTRA advantage that it was free. Plus, computer power accelerated quickly during the same period which reduced the advantages in media with a new paradigm; let's throw more power and money at the problem. Ironically, this actually worked. Oh, and the fact that initially it was only available for PowerPC was a problem; by the time the Intel version appeared the advantages had all but vanished.
Atari ST
It WAS a better computer, but it wasn't a better game machine. It was also more successful in the UK due to the fact it was significantly cheaper than the Amiga. Hell, an affordable Amiga didn't really appear on that side of the pond until late 1988, by which time the low end ST was already in its second iteration (the 520STFM) and incredibly successful. The Amiga 500 was still 100 pounds more expensive at best (and you could get package deals on the ST). Plus, since most of the games developed for the platforms seemed to be coming out of Europe (at least from my perspective), the fact that the ST was more successful meant that most of the games got released on that platform first.
Bear in mind; the CPU was faster, the operating system and desktop were in ROM and the addition of MIDI ports was an inspired move on Atari's part that got the interest of the music crowd. Plus, add in the beautiful high-res mono screen for desktop publishing and you had a winner.
Now, that's not saying the Atari was perfect. The keyboard sucked, and the early ST's being hobbled with single-sided drive was a stigma the Atari had throughout its life because everything was written with single-sided disks in mind. Now, there were some fancy formats that meant that single-sided users could use the disk but it contained extra stuff for double-sided users (as I recall Starglider did this) but it remains that everyone always tried to write to the lowest common denominator... and that hurt
Why would anyone post that other than to be mean, to hurt others and ruin something they might enjoy, and to draw attention to themselves? There's no reason to post spoilers unless you're jealous of someone else getting attention.
I really feel sorry for someone that is so insecure they have to do something like that to get attention.
(And it's because of tiny minds like the poster's that I took the weekend off and read it all before exposing myself to any media again.)
In the end the ST wasn't really "faster". The Amiga was more of a highly parallel system where the ST had a serialized approach. In other words the Amiga could do a lot more even though it's physical CPU clock speed was lower.
FTFA:
While pre-recorded VHS tapes were as cheap as chips, Laserdiscs were $50 each.
Except when pre-recorded VHS tapes never dropped below the "$99 priced for rental" level, while the letterboxed LD was available for $20-35...
This sig intentionally left justified.
The title should have read The Complete History of A/V Format Wars. Here I thought that it was going to document such things as CDF versus RSS versus Atom.
The article is comedic at best.
"The ST was also the first choice of the CAD engineer." uh huh, I see. So AutoCAD on the PC was the 2nd or 3rd choice?
Its a crock for amusement only. The Author has no idea of the real technical details of the things he talks about evident in his comments about laser-disc doubling the lines of VHS (which also is untrue).
But even worse, the Slashdot lead-in suggests that there was some direct comparison made between Atari ST and Amiga. There wasn't.
Then why do they project film-based movies this way?
/former dollar-theater projectionist
They don't. Movie projectors feed the film from the center of the platter (like 8-track), but they have a second take-up platter for film coming out of the projector. At the end of the film, they switch the feed mechanism from one platter to the other and run the film back to the first platter in the next showing. There's only friction and wear on a tiny part of the film, instead of along the whole length like in 8-track's Moebius loop setup.
Yes. it makes you long for a '-1, Pointless loser' moderation option.
Although if we're asking, I'd still want '-1, User Friendly link' before that one.
I have some people (home computers not work) backing up to CD-RW and now DVD-RW. I had to switch only because they have more data then a single CD can hold. The backup works great. I have recovered their file without any issue. I am using the CD/DVD as a big floppy drive. The same can be done with an external USB/Firewire hard drive. Other then filling the CD this has worked without an error for the last 5 years. Other then breaking the disk once (the disk was stepped on while it (the disk) was on over a pen) No failures. Either very good luck or the 1000 writes is short? I don't care I always have them do the backup twice on two different dicks.
Atari even knew it was crap, by calling its operating system "TOS"
TOS was unofficially known as "Tramiel Operating System". I believe Ol' Jack had a pretty well-inflated ego.
The Atart ST most certainly was NOT "crap", though it was far from being technically superior to the Amiga, at least when they were initially introduced. There were a few points in Atari's favour that gave it an edge over the Amiga in niche applications:
* It has MIDI ports built in and superior music sequencer software. Atari's and Macs were the musicians choice, and the Atari was particularly appealing because the MIDI ports weren't an add-on and the price point was lower than the Mac. The built-in sound was crappy (only on par with my Coleco computer) and the Amiga had great stereo sound--but not good enough for professional sound production, which at the time always used the output of professional MIDI-connected instruments over the built-in sound of computers.
* It had superior display choices than the Amiga (I mean image quality, not in terms of graphics performance/colours/resolution of the computer itself). The Atari ST had very good video output signals and the monitors were of matching quality. The monochrome monitor was small but very crisp and easy on the eyes, making it ideal for desktop publishing. The Atari ST was thought better than the Amiga by many for desktop publishing for print media. Amiga was obviously king of VIDEO production as the Amiga designers put a priority on NTSC and PAL compatibility over visual crispness.
* The ST had the same CPU running 12 percent faster than in the US Amiga (and I think the Euro Amiga was a bit slower yet). Raw mathematical operations that couldn't use the co-processors in the Amiga ran faster on the ST. The Amiga's clock speed was a multiple of the "colourburst" frequencies of colour television signals. That is why the Amiga didn't fully clock the 68K CPU--the slightly slower rate made it work much better with video equipment (making genlocks, etc. trivial to do).
The Amiga overall was technically far more sophisticated than the ST because its origins come from video game design. Amiga was engineered by a team composed largely of ex Atari engineers who were responsible for the 8-bit line of Atari computers and consoles. In fact, it shows in the architecture of both machines as they both made extensive use of purpose-built coprocessors (TIA, GTIA, POKEY, etc in the Atari 8-bits and Paula, Denise, Agnes, etc in the Amiga). Amiga didn't start out as a Comomdore machine of course--it was originally the "Lorraine Project" form the Amiga corporation (whose released products were mainly aftermarket game controllers--the revenue used to fund Lorraine). Lorraine was to be the engine for a high-end console, but this was the post-shakeout console market and there was little appetite by investors to enter what was thought to be a market killed by cheap home computers.
Amiga needed help with releasing the Lorraine as a product. Since Amiga was formed bye ex-Atari engineers, they approached Atari (recently acquitred by ex-Commodore head Tramiel) to license the chipset to be used in a next-generation Atari product--and since Tramiel was king of Atari now it was probably going to be a computer. Commodore was quite threatened by this obviously, and to add insult to injury they were losing talented Tramiel loyalists to Atari. Commodore couldn't let this happen, so they swooped in and bought Amiga corp--this abruptly ended their negotiations with Atari, and also for some reason meant the discontinuation of its entire line of Amiga game controllers. So, in actual fact the Amiga was probably the REAL successor to the Atari 8-bit line as it shares much more heritage with the Atari 800 than the Atari ST does (with a similar design philosophy--right down to naming their projects after women...Pam, Colleen...Lorraine).
Of course, Tramiel was steamed that Commodore would do such a thing (and wasn't all that happy with Jay Miner and co eith
From the section on HD Audio: Punters won't be interested if they can't get their money's worth out of a purchase. And it's the punter, not the record companies, that decides what a recording is worth. A £15 CD isn't so bad when you can get an extra copies; it's a bit more like three identical CDs for £5 each.
From the section on DTS: Introducing more things that can go wrong is hardly "simplifying things". They tried synchronised discs a long time ago -- just before they found out why printing the soundtrack alongside the pictures would have been a better idea. See "Vitaphone".
From the section on the Atari ST: Oh, yeah, 16 colours chosen from a palette of 512 at 320x200. No vertical extension to x256 on PAL machines. The sound ("it can recreate 21 musical instruments!" -- yeah, maybe 18 casio PT-10s, two penny whistles and a kazoo) may have been amazing if all you'd ever heard was a Speccy, but the Commodore 64 had a better sound chip and was only an 8-bit processor. The Atari ST was built straight from various application notes. It sucked donkey balls. </amiga owner>
MiniDisc lost out because it was proprietary and too expensive. In 1998 I was actually seriously thinking of buying a MiniDisc recorder, but I ended up buying my first CD-R drive (the choice was made on the basis that I would be able to play my home-recorded CDs anywhere there was a CD player, and not have to carry around such an expensive piece of kit). I know MiniDisc users who swore by the format and still do; but the only way I would buy one today would be if I had a very specific job in mind
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
If Sony's betamax had won Sony would have made a mint. It would therefore have had a pile of cash when it turned to the dark side, buying even more content and inventing even more DRM for it. No, no. VHS was the best choice. It was technologically inferior - but it was a hell of a lot safer. Sony is less evil than Microsoft, but not by much.
This article dances around the issue of DRM-enabled and proprietary technology so carefully that it must be deliberate:
Betamax
Sony refused to freely license Betamax technology. In fact, the creation of VHS was actually, in part, a retaliation on the part of other manufacturers that Sony had effectively locked out of the market. Furthermore, Sony refused to license Betamax to content providers they didn't care for, such as the PR0N industry.
High-definition audio
The industry created high-definition audio in attempt to supersede the highly-rippable CD with a locked-down, copy-protected, DRM-entangled format. Meanwhile, the majority of consumers (the ones ripping CDs to MP3s, or just downloading digital music directly) didn't give two shits. And the audiophiles who wanted the fidelity of high-def were more than balanced out by those who perceived that high-definition audio was attempt force DRM down the throats of consumers, and thus balked.
MiniDisc
Although the article mentions that it was proprietary, the article fails to mention that MiniDiscs included copy protection technology (SCMS) which could be used to prevent digital-to-digital copying.
I doubt that any of these products would have succeeded if they hadn't been proprietary and/or DRM-encumbered (Betamax's 1-hour limit was the main reason it died; high-definition audio was the answer to a question no one had asked; MiniDisc and DCC were too busy in their format war to release that CD-R and MP3 were obsoleting them), but deliberately failing to mention the critical role that DRM played in helping to sink the products that employed them isn't just corporate whoring, but outright bad journalism.
Your bank is insolvent.
Taking Money Back
oookay - that would be a two platter system (although my brain is trying to figure out how you ran the film in reverse - showing the movie forward).
I'm referring to the single platter systems mentioned:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_projector
"The way the film is fed from the platter to the projector is not unlike an eight-track audio cartridge. Film is unwound from the center of the platter through a mechanism called a "brain" which controls the speed of the platter's rotation so that it matches the speed of the film as it is fed to the projector. The film winds through a series of rollers from the platter stack to the projector, through the projector, through another series of rollers back to the platter stack, and then onto the platter serving as the take-up reel."
Which was also touched on at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_cartridge
"The endless loop tape concept, too, continues to be used in modern cinema movie projectors, although in that application the spool is actively rotated and not drawn by tension on the film."
But I've never worked at a cinema and the last movie glitch I got fee popcorn coupons was because the sound board on the digital media player failed. Whatever media that was.
I'm no affcionado...my Receiver and 5.1 speakers-in-a-box cost $400 a few years ago.
Way more action behind my head.
Blar.
im not going to disagree with the minidisk being inferior, but minidisk players are completely awesome. Small, and will run for months on a SINGLE double A
Interesting, I don't think it actually said that the ST was better than the Amiga anywhere there (I had both at the time).
Also it's incorrect in saying that Atari fended off Microsoft. Atari wanted to run DOS/Windows on their 68000 based machine (they went there first) but Microsoft told them that they could not possibly do 68K version in time for Atari's desired release date. I got that from both the news media at the time and directly from Jack Trameil at the Chicago CES in '86.
First of all you COULD record your own 8 tracks. Several companies (even Rat Shack) sold 8 track recorders and blank tapes. The only problem was 8 TRACKS SUCK. Tremendous flutter and wow, poor frequency response and short tape life (every have to remove a gordian knot of tape from a car player after pulling the cart out?)
Laser Disks were NOT killed off by VHS. The two formats lived side by side for the life of both. (OK VHS is still around, but not for pre-recorded). In comparing software costs people seem to forget the bad old days when VHS videos were $50-$100 each. It took the studios a while to realize that they could make more money at the $20 price point (and you can thank Kmart for that). While Laserdisk was selling along side RCA's CED disks laser disk prices dropped to about $25 a disk for most titles. I NEVER spend as much as $50 for a laser disk (well, except for a few collector's packages recorded in CAV format). Machines did drop in price to $250 or less. What kept laser disk in the background was that you could NOT record on them. So you had to buy two machines, one disk and one tape. Why bother if you could get pre-recorded tapes (even if they looked like crap compared to the laser disk)? It was DVD that signed laser disks death warrant. Smaller, cheaper (eventually), better picture, and backward compatible with CD's. What more could you want?
BTW strange as it may seem laser disks were NEVER copy protected. No macrovision crap. You can copy ANY laser disk to VHS or DVD without any hacking (just two machines and jumper cables).
...having better copy protection.
He's on the Dark Side.
I have always been an "early adopter" type, and I've had 1) VHS tapes, 2) an RCA capacitance-style video disk player, 3) a laser disc player, and eventually 4) a DVD player. Comparing a movie on DVD to one on a laser disc is quite an experience. While it's true that the laser disc was miles ahead of VHS in picture quality, it was miles behind DVD. It looks fuzzy and wiggly in comparison. (However, the sound is similar given that they're both digital.) The capacitance-style video disc (which used a real needle in a real groove) had only one real advantage, which was that the media themselves were much cheaper than laser discs, and in fact were usually cheaper than prerecorded VHS tapes. However, the picture quality was dismal (it tended to shimmy as the scan lines weren't always aligned properly) and the sound quality was closer to something you'd expect from an old Victrola, with surprising amounts of surface noise. They were prone to skips and clicks; it was a physical analog media revolving at a very high speed. Amazingly retro, really, when you get right down to it. In terms of video, it seems to me that the DVD has deserved its success, although we'll of course have to stay tuned and see what happens with the high-def formats, which have much better picture and sound quality as long as your TV and sound system can take advantage of the improvements.
The inventor (the leader of the team) was Jay Miner, an interesting fellow all in all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Miner
The Commodore and Atari history is included.
Directory listing was once a delightful part of web browsing. There is no more efficient way of finding files.
But now, one after one, sites which do not restrict directory listing are disappearing forever.
Why? Because of snotty punk assholes like "anonymous reader", who stumble upon some quasi-personal file (the same file six dozen individuals saw but then respectfully moved on from before you) then BITCH anAd BLATHER about it repeatedly until everybody is made to know just how freaking COOL HE IS for having found it.
This article is pathetic.
There's a huge bonus to MD players as well: you can instantly record in the middle of a track, change tracks around, record at the end of the disc; wherever you want, and label the tracks as well. Thank You, user-modifiable TOC. In reality, you record linearly on the MD, and the TOC just looks up the location on the disc, just like a CD, except the TOC can be modified forever while leaving the music data alone. Track access on decks was via a twist-n-push knob, very convenient for live music replay and sound effects in theatre (especially before the advent of fast laptops and MP3), where you may need to play a 3-second Track 4 followed by the 2-minute Track 1, followed again by 3-second Track 4, and then 5-minute Track 5.
I agree Sony snuffed out their chances by wrapping up licensing tighter than a drum; however, other companies did make MD equipment: Sharp used to, Tascam still does.
JMO.
It didn't help Be that Metrowerks pretty much abandoned development on the developer tools for BeOS, and had no intention of even telling Be, Inc., that the effort was being quietly halted. I know because I was the last hire for the "Be Hive," when Metrowerks was still headquartered in Austin, TX. I was going to relocate from Phoenix to Austin for this job, and then one day my boss called me at my house in Phoenix (where I was working while trying to market my house so I could relocate) to let me know what was going on.
At that point, I was offered a chance to switch to one of Metrowerks' other divisions, but I declined, since I really had taken the job because of the BeOS development work. (Actually, I gave my boss a really inflated estimate for how long it would take me to sell my house and move, and that had the same general effect. Kind of like saying, "Gee, my motivation to move has just been destroyed.")
What pissed me off is that the company had no plan or (apparent) intention of warning Be or handing off development in a coherent, sensible way. Fortunately, Be found out through the grapevine, but by that point, they'd lost a major ally.
Later on, I ran into Dominic Giampolo at Comdex; I had seen him a couple times at the Metrowerks office in Austin, so we exchanged warm greetings after I reminded him of who I was. Dominic told me I should say hi to Jean Louis, but warned me to downplay the Metrowerks connection because feelings were still a bit raw over that whole incident.
Had Be been given a fair shake, there's no telling what they could have done. I think BeOS would have been a great PDA/smartphone OS, and before I left Metrowerks, I saw evidence in the Be header files that they had porting efforts underway for CPU architectures like the Hitachi SH-3/4 (which were popular chips for PDAs at the time).
Perhaps they can share stories as members of the "Veterans of Format Wars".
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
If Cinerama had won the format wars each film since then would have required 66% more celluloid film to shoot and project, since the process required 3 cameras. This would have created an ecological disaster, with a shocking usage of 66% more toxic processing chemicals, not to mention stock. It is safe to say that the world would be a more polluted place had Cinerama won the format wars.
Also, the great revolution in American cinema occurred in the late 60's and early 70's -- not because of the largesse of projection (and encumberance of a huge 3 camera setup) but because of the nibleness of lighter, newer equipment and sensitive film stocks. The coarse reality that 70's cinema focused on truly changed society, and it simply couldn't have been done in Cinerama (think about it, could Easy Rider have captured what it captured with the encumberance of Cinerama?).
Yes, I was once a Sony Knight, the same as your father.
Chris Mattern
unless u mean factory-installed...don't forget the 4track, the brainchild of earl MADMAN muntz;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntz_Stereo-Pak
(Feel free to do the same to this.) Ah, Slashdot, where pointing out that trolls are mean is considered "insightful." If I told you the GNAA is not actually an advocacy organization for homesexual black men, but rather a few fat guys bothering people on the internet, would I be modded informative?
Frosty piss posts are worthless, GNAA posts are worthless and hurtful, but they are the least of this site's neuroses.
FTFA : Why did it lose?
In the end, the power of Windows and Mac OS was too great. Despite quite substantial public and commercial interest, funding dried up. The CEO of BeOS even launched a lawsuit against Microsoft, claiming that it prevented BeOS from being bundled with computers from Dell.
Wrong. True reason : Gassé's greed.
You just got troll'd!
Can I have some of the stuff you appear to be smoking? Since when is there any compression on CD?
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
>Hi-def audio failed not because of format wars, but because
>no human can hear a difference between 24 bit 192 khz sampled
>hi-def audio and 16 bit 44.1 khz sampled audio. Double blind
>testing shows that listeners just can't hear any difference.
>A well-dithered modern CD playing 16-bit 44.khz sampled audio
>sounds as good as it gets. Bats may be able to hear a difference
>between that 20 khz rolloff and the 80 khz rolloff of hi-def audio,
> but humans can't.
Actually SACD was/is technically inferior to regular CD-Audio. The idea was that with the higher sampling frequency you would have an easier time creating a filter to roll off the out-of-band sampling noise. But it was also single-bit streaming which introduces all sorts of noise all by itself. The parts were *cheaper* for SACD as well.
HDCD, which is a 20-bit PCM format, solves the only recognized issue with regular CD - quantization effects at low amplitude. It's effectively dead, too, but it was actually superior, and backwards compatible with CD.
Brett
I've seen minidisc players/recorders in Japanese laptops as recent as 3 years ago. Maybe they still make them, but I don't hang out with too many people w/ Japanese laptops.
The tech that should never have been created. Seriously, I just decline to bother with crippled articles like this. Where's the "printer" (reader) friendly button when you need it?
This lovely format had such a bright future, until the recording companies killed it.
On reasonably decent gear (Denon receiver, and Athena speakers), DTS sounds waaay better than DD on most movies I have seen.
This most likely due to the higher bitrate, but still it is better, and noticeably so.
-Randy
I know it's starting to piss me off.
The soccer episode was ok, but the cooking episode.... ugghhhh....
You can't take the sky from me.
I wanna know what those shitheads are smoking. It must be some nice shit if they can be this stupid.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
This is hardly a "complete" history of format wars. Dolby Noise Reduction on audio cassettes? DivX discs? Flash memory cards? Windows Media Player vs Real Player? MP3 vs everything else? DVD-R vs DVD+R? Sure, UMD isn't entirely dead yeat, and HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray is still going, but there are a lot of other interesting battles that have been fought and won.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
The Amiga may have been a flop in the U.S., but it was very successful in Europe during the late-1980s and early-1990s. After the A500 came out and the price came down (the A1000 was *expensive* IIRC), it displaced the cheaper (but less impressive) Atari ST to become the desirable machine of choice, and was probably the leading 16-bit machine.
It eventually suffered in the early 1990s due to Commodore resting on their laurels, the ever-decreasing cost of PC clones at one end, and the success of the Mega Drive (Genesis) and SNES at the other. But there was a period of a few years when it was one of *the* machines and it did quite well.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The movie projector page mentions that, "Three or more platters are stacked together to create a platter system." and that the empty one is used as a take up spool.
What about the microcassette/minicassette/picocassette/Scoopman format wars? Sony vs. Philips/Everyone Else. Thank god Sony lost (again) just like with MemoryStick, etc.
Minidisc was huge in japan, and fairly popular in europe. The small size factor compared to CD was very useful on trains. Plus it was a great medium if you rode a motorcycle or worked out with the large buffers.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
The public also doesn't really care about video quality either. Look at YouTube's popularity for instance. The streaming quality is terrible, and in almost all cases the uploaded video was already horribly compressed to begin with, making the stream look even worse. Some videos you have to download the FLV file just to view the video clearly, and that doesn't always help. There are better video sites out there with superior streaming quality, but YouTube and its shitty artifact-laden display is apparently not only good enough for most people, it's supposedly taking viewers away from TV watching.
This is why neither Blu-Ray nor HD DVD will win out either. Most of the general public is just fine with DVDs. DVDs won out over VHSs because of their random access, lack of moving parts, superior picture quality without that awful grainy or blurry effect most VHS tapes give off, longer theoretical shelf life, no rewinding, etc. Of course it wasn't until DVD players and discs became cheap and the presence of DVRs started to take foothold that it overcome VHS completely (something that never happened with the LaserDisc), but none of the two new formats have that kind of advantage over their predecessor. The only thing that one gets when buying a Blu-Ray or HD DVD disc instead of a DVD from the point of view of the consumer is 7.1 surround, 1080p HD video, and much larger space on the disc. All of this is irreverent if the consumer doesn't own a home theater or an HDTV, neither of which will you find in the average American household. Your average Joe is just fine with stereo and 480i, so long as the picture and sound are clear. I'd go as far as saying that I think the majority of HDTV sales in the US is due to customer ambiguity regarding the FCC cutoff, having cable customers and those who would otherwise by an SDTV rush out and buy this fancy new television set that is just overkill for them and their wallet.