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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."
Agreed. MDs were notorious for being highly flaky. I've used these suckers, and the people who love these things were are always apologetic about MDs that go bad, saying stuff like "Well, we can just send it back to Sony who can recreate the TOC."
That's the only thing you can do? Sheesh. Plus, these things are locked down in a way that the only way you can get audio off of them is to use the 'analog loophole'. Which sucks, because when you want to do post-processing on the raw audio you just recorded, you want it to be as clean as possible. And of course you always lose something in the D/A->A/D conversion process. *sigh*
Gimme a good hard disk recording system and a CD burner any day over that crap.
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Sound quality aside, MiniDisc shot itself in the foot as Sony refused to open up the format to allow for direct access to the disc. You were never able to "rip" tracks from the MiniDisc which limited it's ability to succeed as a digital recording format. It was effectively a tape.
If you could have plugged them into your computer and used them as general purpose media they would have taken off like a flash.
The MiniDisc is a perfect example of a product that could have been much larger but was curtailed due to anti piracy measures.
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.
In all fairness, how many people ever came close to even 1,000 rewrites on a single CD-RW?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
1. Betamax vs. VHS - Betamax was technically superior in a few ways, but lost due to Sony arrogance and vendor lock-in strategies. Which we will see repeated down the line.
2. Laserdisc - actually a very cool technology. In terms of geeky cool factor, possibly only second to Capacitance Electronic Discs (a true Video LP whose needle read data by measuring changes in Capacitance in the grooves, also the last format designed by American Engineers). However, both were unable to do home recording, and prohibitively expensive.
3. 8-Track - Nobody gives a shit. LPs sounded better, and CDs were better than both.
4. HD-Audio - Again, for the most part, nobody gives a shit. DVD-Audio, while truly superior to CDs, had no market, and the 1-bit 1Mhz "Super-Audio CD" actually has worse dynamic range and fidelity than a correctly mastered 16-bit 44.1kHz Compact disc.
5. Minidisc - Sony blew another one. A somewhat cool technology ruined by Sony Lock-in/Lock-down now rendered completely irrelevant by FLASH memory, and shakey even in its day due to CD-Rs.
6. BEOS - A competitor in the overcrowded consumer OS market. The Execs tried to push Apple for waaaay more than they were worth, and the rest is history. A history of the triumphant return of Steve Jobs, and Apple riding OS X and the iPod to great success, making BEOS irrelevant.
7. DTS - the differences between DTS and DD are irrelevant except to Home Cinema Afficianados.
8. AtariST - Interesting machine, but nowhere near the technical Marvel of the Commodore Amiga. Another Footnote in history.
The article is bunch of recycled pap on a slow news day.
/. summary:
10. It puts Betamax up agains VHS, a format war which should have been won by Video2000
9. It puts Minidisc up agains the CD, although it competed with DCC at the time as the next-gen compact cassette. Recordable CD's didn't exist at that time.
8. They put laserdisc up agains VHS, even though laserdisc's where never writable. There never was a format-war around laserdisc, it was just a product which was released ahead of it's time and failed because of that.
7. Selecting 8 track tapes over Compact Cassettes because, erm, their fixed length 'tracks' are so convenient. Sure, if you enjoy listening to silence... 6. Here is a format war for you, DVD-Audio together with SA-CD again the normal CD. Just ignore the actual format war... And, I quote: "The copy protection is good too, which means less of that pesky piracy the music industry keeps banging on about." Right. 5. Right after the 'All hail HD Audio' part comes the argument that Mini-Disc should have won because of the lossy compression. 4. Yes, BeOS should have survived. But it doesn't explain what an OS has to do in an article about format-wars. 3. DTS should be used instead of Dolby Digital because it's handy in theaters, so we should all use DTS at home. And DTS can use any number of channels which is a good thing, because standards exist to make sure everybody does things differently. 2. Atari-ST, it's not just operating systems in this format war, whole computers count as 'Format' these days. 1. No, its not a top 10, the last page just sums up the ideal world of BeOS operated Betamax recorders with 8-Track laserdiscs and Atrac compressed DTS sound stored on a separate minidisc to be played on and HD-Audio Atari. Or something like that.
ST? Render unto me a fucking break.
At the time I bought my Amiga (serial # 11) I was working for a PC graphics card company. Back then there was only one PC video card that would do what the Amiga did, the IBM professional graphics controller or "PGC". I'm not sure anybody actually bought one, it was $2500 whereas the Amiga was $1000 and had all sorts of added video goodies that blew even the PGC well and truly out of the water.
Matt Dillon (Dragonfly BSD/FreeBSD) ported bash to the Amiga. There were a couple of UUCP packages - Amigas were shuttling news and mail around in the pre-internet era while Atari's barely worked with a modem to connect to a BBS.
The Amiga had a real C compiler and was the first home computer that gave you access to a 68k's linear address space, some people bought them because of this and didn't even care about the graphics.
Jim Macraz OS gave you the ability to pull a window from background to foreground faster than probably any OS even today. Certainly faster than the relatively contemporary wintel box I'm (sigh, reluctantly) typing this on.
Dpaint III made the less capable photoshop-to-come-later look stupid, overly complex and arcane. To this day I'd pretty much kill for a PC clone of Dpaint. That and that alone made then SIGGRAPH-only graphics possible for home users that didn't have access to clusters of Apollo workstations. Leo Schwab (Hi Leo!) knocked off Pixar's first serious animation ("Red's Dream") in a weekend which got him in a slight amount of trouble with Pixar.
I formatted a book (a manual for a piece of software) on my Amiga with some simple postscript software I wrote that took runoff commands, first to a postscript priter then right to a Linotronic that set film. The software the manual was for was called "The Director" - Keith Doyle's animation scripting language later ripped off by Macromedia which later begat flash.
There was a port of Word Perfect for the Amiga. God only knows what'd happen if 1-2-3 and dbase had been ported. Knowing what I now know about IBM I suspect they paid people not to port to the Amiga as rumors of these ports existed at the time.
As for music, that's great the article can dig up some wonk nobody's heard of that still uses a (spit) ST. I met Todd Rungren at some Amiga function in LA, more musicians used Amigas than STs. Never mind the (scifi) TV shows that used Amiags for video work. I'm trying to think of something the ST did right. Umm...
In its day the Amiga was the best computer you could buy for virtually anything. It's just that its day lasted only about 2 years, but it was still probably the most amazing computer ever built. When Microsoft finally released a copy of Windows that would stay up for more than 10 minutes (3.1) the Amiga was doomed. Previous versions of windows, 1, 2, 3.0 when compared against the Amiga came off looking like a Trabant compared to an MB SLR.
Any article that tries to show how the best never made it and picked the ST over the Amiga is seriously flawed to put it mildly.
Anything you do on a computer today we did on an Amiga 20 years ago well before PC's and Mac's could even come close. Open source got its first jump start there. It was unixy enough to keep us sated. It had scsi (albeit an add on, but the box had a connector to allow for such add ons).
The late 80's were a heady time because of this box and the computing wrld has been a time wasting x86/win nightmare ever sice that we're still barely out of.
If you look up "it's a real shame" in Wikipedia you'll find a picture of an Amiga 1000.
I suppose it it's any reconcilliation, I eschewed the flakey Commodore 1070 monitor for a Sony KV1311CR, a vastly superior monitor that I still have and still use for some things while the Amiga, it's SCSI subsystem and all those new at the time (as in $50 for 10) high density floppies sit languishing in the barn. Just for the memories I'd never get rid of it.
ST? It is to laugh...
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