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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.