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

minidisc?

[toQDuj]

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.

Great, more holy wars.

[morgan_greywolf]

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!

8-Track? And a couple of other mistakes.

[ishmalius]

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.

Re:8-Track? You are SO high

[rueger]

The 8 track was the superior format at the time that it peaked in popularity. At the time when 8 tracks were the format for car audio, cassette players were horrid little things with mediocre quality.

8-tracks also offered a true 4 channel audio system that was better than anything available on cassette or disc.

Once cassette tape moved to high end formulations like chrome tapes, and added Dolby etc, the game changed significantly and 8-tracks faded away.

The people who run down 8-track as a format usually have little experience with it and don't recall, or weren't born early enough, to recall that it represented the very earliest move away from radio towards a car audio that allowed an individual to choose what music they would listen to.

Arguably the 8-track is the ancestor of what would eventually become the iPod.

Re:Minidisc???

[TheRaven64]

I was at a lecture on digital compression techniques in the early '90s, when MiniDisc and VideoCD were still new and shiny. The lecturer brought in a decent HiFi and did a blind test between MiniDisc and CD. Around 70% of the audience could hear that MiniDisc was inferior, the rest couldn't tell the difference.

I don't know how the newer compression algorithms, but the original was an ugly hack to get 650MB of audio data onto a 140MB disk by doing some very rough frequency cuts. Even on a half-decent pair of headphones you can hear the frequency holes.

The newer 1GB disks are a bit more interesting, but now they are competing with 8GB flash drives. I'd quite like a 1GB MiniDisc drive in a laptop, but for data small enough to fit on a removable disk it's usually easier to use a network these days, so there isn't much call for one unless you can make it bootable.

Re:Atari ST

[rs79]

"I used to design full page ads and Yellow Pages ads on the ST"

That's nice. I typeset a book, first to a Lserwriter then to a Linotronic for 1200dpi film output and ran UUCP connectivity for Los Angeles on my Amiga.

At the same time.