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."

Comments

Atari ST

[Spacejock]

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.)

Re:Blah

[drinkypoo]

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.

Better musical capabilities? The Amiga had a 31,250 mode on its serial port and with a very simple converter box you could be speaking MIDI. The box cost probably less than $5 to make commercially (including development, which is a weekend job for the electronics and a week-long job for the plastic, probably) and was sold under $50. A friend of mine made one from shit he had lying around (I think he had to buy some DIN connectors, but that's it.)

The Amiga was like seconds behind the Atari in the 1MB ram for cheap department. Zorro II/III buses are clock-rate buses and you can put RAM on them with relatively little performance penalty, so even on Amiga 500s I've seen 32MB RAM and more (not to mention that they started putting substantial RAM expansion into accelerators, where there would be a benefit to not going across the system bus, at least in some cases. And the Amiga became far cheaper than the Atari in short order. Then the Atari died, then the Amiga did. And there is no question that Amiga had more powerful machines.

MiniDisc should have won over CD. 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

Okay, just stop... MiniDisc was dramatically more expensive to produce than a CD. And the quality, even at "full bitrate" was noticeably worse than a CD (I believe over 2/3 of listeners could tell the difference in Sony's tests back then, and it was not positive in favor of MiniDisc) so you're just deluded anyway. It had advantages but I'm quite glad we never went there since flash memory kicks the shit out of minidisc today. Soon it will be cheaper to buy flash media than minidisc media. It's already long since become far cheaper to buy flash than Zip disks...

Some people thought Minidisc sounded better than a CD. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation will tell you that these people are idiots. But there is a reason for it; some Minidisc players actually did a range expansion on the audio to pep it up. So they might make certain kinds of music sound better but in all cases Minidisc produces a lower quality of audio (in terms of faithful reproduction) than a CDDA disc.