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!

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.