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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."
No way. The CD is superior to the minidisc in every way with the execpetion of size. There have even been several audio tests where people picked cassette tapes with Dolby S noise reduction over minidiscs.
Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Minidisk was having a format war with Philips Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) which it easily won, despite having a higher compression ratio. Compression on minidisc is about 10x higher compared to CD and even I can hear it.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
The MD failed because it was yet another proprietary Sony format which offered too little too late, especially as the CD market was already well established. MDs may have had a place in portable media but soon after they started gaining traction MP3 players saw to that.
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.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
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!
My blog
Thanks for the heads up.
Obvously the article is written by a drooling moron. No need to waste time on this.
10 pages, each with an illustration larger than the text and of course a lot of advertisements.
From the article: The key to getting the Atari into the mainstream would have been more games...
Err...no. No, the problem was that is was seen purely as a games machine by the mainstream, not as the decent workhorse it actually was. And at gaming, it lost to the Amiga hands down.
His other points about the system are hit and miss. It was the musicians' machine of choice, true. It was the CAD users' machine of choice? Not really, no. It could have been, but it wasn't. The hardware was there, the nice "hi-res" (for 1985/86!) mono monitor was excellent, it had a faster clockspeed than its other 68000-based rivals and utterly outstripped the frankly miserable x86 line of that time, but even so there were attributes of the system that meant it just wasn't going to win. Those attributes were often chosen to cut costs (the awful keyboard for instance) and the costs were being cut because the machine was primarily seen by the market as being for games.
I owned an ST. For years it remained the most productive system I ever owned, running its own code, Mac code via Spectre GCR and PC code via a hardware 286 emulator (ATSpeed or Vortex - not sure I remember which one I used). With Protex, Signum, Calamus and Steinberg 12 it made for a superb home system. But to say it failed to dominate the mainstream due to lack of games? That's just madness.
Cheers,
Ian
Now get the hell off my lawn...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
The Atari ST had MIDI ports. That was what made it stand out for musicians. There really wasn't enough development of it to justify its continued existence.
The minidisc suffered from entering a market saturated with a format that was superior in several ways and didn't offer sufficient advantages over the other recordable medium (compact cassette) to justify its price tag.
If Steve Jobs hadn't gone back to Apple, Creative would probably have dominated the mp3 player market.
8-track was abysmal. You could get bleeding from the other tracks, the tapes were unweildy and thre was a break in the music at the tape splice. On the plus side you uhmmmm didn't need to rewind them.
I think every example in this article is absolutely accurate. But then again, I'm posting this from a parallel universe on my Commodore 1024 running OS/2 XP in the Confederate States of America.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Every single one of these format wars is between two formats that were, in fact, reasonable comparable. This is all war stories and middle-aged nostalgia. As Pete Seeger put it (in his added stanza to "Both Sides, Now") "Something's lost and something's gained in living every day."
Each of the defeated formats had some nice stuff about it, but it's not as if there was anything so terrible about their passing, other than angst for those who bought into the orphaned formats. Some of his comments are just weird. For example, he praises 8-track tapes basically because of its being marginally easier to find individual songs on them... which is true only if you're comparing it to cassettes, not to CDs.
Yeahyeahyeah and what's more a B24 Liberator was soooo much better than a B17 Flying Fortress, the U. S. should have adopted PAL instead of NTSC, and a Pickett and Eckel slide rule was way better than a Keuffel and Esser.
I mean, it's not like Cinerama. Cinerama was great, so much better than CInemaScope or IMAX or any of the other wide-screen processes, and it just blew away anything you think you've seen on HDTV. Cinerama really mattered. The world would actually have been a better place if CInerama had won the format wars. In all likelihood, if only Cinerama had survived, movies would be better, the Beatles would never have broken up, and the Arabs and Israelis would have put aside their differences, united by the joy of watching widescreen movies.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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.
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.
TFA is ludicrously positive about the 8-track. In practice, this is one format that deserved to die a quick death. The 'endless loop' cassette format meant that 8-track was very susceptible to jamming, and that the tape wore down rather quickly. It also makes fast-forwarding difficult, and rewinding impossible. Incredibly, TFA tries to sell this as an advantage.
Also, the cassettes were large and unwieldy. Had 8-track been the dominant format, the Walkman wouldn't have happened.
No, for once, this was a format war that ended as it should, with the superior format (Philips Compact Cassette) wiping out all competition.
Also, one thing that becomes obvious when reading the article that he doesn't mention: the public at large cares little about sound quality. Now this is only true to a point--crappy sound quality won't do it, but CD is great for most people. You aren't going to get the general public to buy an expensive BR player by telling them the sound quality's good--they are satisfied with the sound quality on DVDs and weren't hoping for something better. There will be people with money to throw around and audiophiles who want absurdly high sound quality, but the general public isn't looking for something better. Being happy with what they've got (heck--we're happy with mp3s, which aren't even as good), the way to get them is to make something that is at least as good as what they've got but is CHEAPER. [Also, I think there is a rapidly increasing number of people who don't like the fact that they can't just save a BR disk on their hard drive/DVR just because of it's immense size (I'm not even talking copy protection here) for use on all of their various devices.]
So much bad information. Where to begin? ...
1) MiniDisc was never intended to replace audio CDs. It was intended to replace audio tapes . Yes, certainly Sony mismanaged the format, but what killed it mostly was the availability of small, portable CD players and the eventual availability of cheap CD burners and burnable discs.
2) DTS lost, sort of, but since a rather large number of DVDs have DTS soundtracks, it's not a terrible loss as DTS is still in business. Plus, it's not entirely correct to say that DTS uses "fractionally more space on a disc" unless 100 to 400% more meets your idea of "fractionally more". However, given the size of dual-layer DVDs, it's sort of accurate in that there's enough space to put a DTS soundtrack out there on most movies if they don't have too many extras on the disc.
3) As far as high definition audio goes, it does still survive, although many don't know that. SACD was horribly bungled by Sony, again, who at first said that it was "impossible" (I believe that is an exact quote) to make hybrid SACD discs which would also play in normal audio CD players. Strangely, smaller independent labels managed to make such discs almost from the beginning of the format. Lack of product, price, and lack of hybrid discs on Sony owned labels had strongly negative impacts on the format. SACD still survives in classical, jazz and some European pop recordings.
DVD-Audio is still alive on some classical and jazz labels, but it's not doing well. The lack of compatibility with CD audio players seems to have really hurt it. While the Dolby AC-3 part of a DVD-Audio disc is easily rippable and convertible to audio CD format, most consumers don't know that and just viewed it as another incompatible format.
we had 1/2" EIAJ (and EIAJ-2) reel to reel videotape, and we liked it! Of course, there was 1" or 2" Quad that were better.... Hell, lets look at 3/4" (umatic) vs. VHS vs. Beta vs. Cartravision (hooray USA). The winner? UMATIC. Better resolution than VHS or Beta, more players than Cartravision, and it has been in use since (gasp....) 1974, and is still going strong.
But really, 8-track?
Toil is Stupid. Don't be Stupid.
I Agree - there's not even the usual "print this article" cheat to read it on one page. Hell even the NYT provides options to go from multipage to single page. CNet is desperate for page views. Well hell - make me editor. I'll make-em flip after every...
(click next page to continue>>)
sentance...
(click next page to continue>>)
or...
(click next page to continue>>)
every...
(click next page to continue>>)
word...
That's REAL revenue baby! Eyeballs - look at all those eyeballs! HA - take that Google!
1) Make article full of outrageous claims that will infuriate geeks
2) Put advertising on all ten pages, post link to Slashdot
3) Profit.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Well, for all those slamming this article as a bunch of crap, bear in mind that this IS from a UK perspective where the 80's and 90's technological marketplaces were quite different from the US. These days, pretty much a wash except that the UK is still far ahead of the US in terms of cellphone tech.
:) The iPod would've killed it if it weren't already dead :D
Anyway, as an ex-pat myself I can say the following;
Laserdisc
Yes, it WAS a good format. Yes, it was a good technology. Yes, it was way too expensive. I think I knew one person with an LD player, and while the quality was really nice it was really not worth the incredible price premium for most users. There was also the fact that at the time, there was a certain "leeriness" about the scratch resistance of the discs themselves; remember this was a time when LP's and cassettes were the formats for music, way before CD's.
8 Track
Well, this is a subjective thing but the sound WAS better from 8-track than from a regular cassette. Well, dolby noise reduction reduced that advantage. Plus, the non-linear format of the tapes was both its saving grace and a factor in its downfall. How many 8-track tapes cut in the middle of a song to flip to the next track and continue playing?
HD Audio
I've got three letters for you; DRM. Yup, a great idea hobbled by DRM that rendered discs almost unusable. The record companies still haven't learned the lesson from that format failure. Personally, I loved it... and the quality was incredible.
Mini Disc
See HD Audio
BeOS
Good and powerful OS, hobbled by lack of developer support, lousy negotiation skills of the marketing folks and a general feeling from the company that "... we'll succeed because we're better, we don't need to sell it..." A bad attitude to have when your competition is Windows and Mac OS, or the increasingly (at the time) nimble Linux. I'd say Linux had a much bigger hand in BeOS' downfall than the article gives credit for; by the time BeOS was commercially viable, Linux already had many of its advantages with the EXTRA advantage that it was free. Plus, computer power accelerated quickly during the same period which reduced the advantages in media with a new paradigm; let's throw more power and money at the problem. Ironically, this actually worked. Oh, and the fact that initially it was only available for PowerPC was a problem; by the time the Intel version appeared the advantages had all but vanished.
Atari ST
It WAS a better computer, but it wasn't a better game machine. It was also more successful in the UK due to the fact it was significantly cheaper than the Amiga. Hell, an affordable Amiga didn't really appear on that side of the pond until late 1988, by which time the low end ST was already in its second iteration (the 520STFM) and incredibly successful. The Amiga 500 was still 100 pounds more expensive at best (and you could get package deals on the ST). Plus, since most of the games developed for the platforms seemed to be coming out of Europe (at least from my perspective), the fact that the ST was more successful meant that most of the games got released on that platform first.
Bear in mind; the CPU was faster, the operating system and desktop were in ROM and the addition of MIDI ports was an inspired move on Atari's part that got the interest of the music crowd. Plus, add in the beautiful high-res mono screen for desktop publishing and you had a winner.
Now, that's not saying the Atari was perfect. The keyboard sucked, and the early ST's being hobbled with single-sided drive was a stigma the Atari had throughout its life because everything was written with single-sided disks in mind. Now, there were some fancy formats that meant that single-sided users could use the disk but it contained extra stuff for double-sided users (as I recall Starglider did this) but it remains that everyone always tried to write to the lowest common denominator... and that hurt
Atari even knew it was crap, by calling its operating system "TOS"
TOS was unofficially known as "Tramiel Operating System". I believe Ol' Jack had a pretty well-inflated ego.
The Atart ST most certainly was NOT "crap", though it was far from being technically superior to the Amiga, at least when they were initially introduced. There were a few points in Atari's favour that gave it an edge over the Amiga in niche applications:
* It has MIDI ports built in and superior music sequencer software. Atari's and Macs were the musicians choice, and the Atari was particularly appealing because the MIDI ports weren't an add-on and the price point was lower than the Mac. The built-in sound was crappy (only on par with my Coleco computer) and the Amiga had great stereo sound--but not good enough for professional sound production, which at the time always used the output of professional MIDI-connected instruments over the built-in sound of computers.
* It had superior display choices than the Amiga (I mean image quality, not in terms of graphics performance/colours/resolution of the computer itself). The Atari ST had very good video output signals and the monitors were of matching quality. The monochrome monitor was small but very crisp and easy on the eyes, making it ideal for desktop publishing. The Atari ST was thought better than the Amiga by many for desktop publishing for print media. Amiga was obviously king of VIDEO production as the Amiga designers put a priority on NTSC and PAL compatibility over visual crispness.
* The ST had the same CPU running 12 percent faster than in the US Amiga (and I think the Euro Amiga was a bit slower yet). Raw mathematical operations that couldn't use the co-processors in the Amiga ran faster on the ST. The Amiga's clock speed was a multiple of the "colourburst" frequencies of colour television signals. That is why the Amiga didn't fully clock the 68K CPU--the slightly slower rate made it work much better with video equipment (making genlocks, etc. trivial to do).
The Amiga overall was technically far more sophisticated than the ST because its origins come from video game design. Amiga was engineered by a team composed largely of ex Atari engineers who were responsible for the 8-bit line of Atari computers and consoles. In fact, it shows in the architecture of both machines as they both made extensive use of purpose-built coprocessors (TIA, GTIA, POKEY, etc in the Atari 8-bits and Paula, Denise, Agnes, etc in the Amiga). Amiga didn't start out as a Comomdore machine of course--it was originally the "Lorraine Project" form the Amiga corporation (whose released products were mainly aftermarket game controllers--the revenue used to fund Lorraine). Lorraine was to be the engine for a high-end console, but this was the post-shakeout console market and there was little appetite by investors to enter what was thought to be a market killed by cheap home computers.
Amiga needed help with releasing the Lorraine as a product. Since Amiga was formed bye ex-Atari engineers, they approached Atari (recently acquitred by ex-Commodore head Tramiel) to license the chipset to be used in a next-generation Atari product--and since Tramiel was king of Atari now it was probably going to be a computer. Commodore was quite threatened by this obviously, and to add insult to injury they were losing talented Tramiel loyalists to Atari. Commodore couldn't let this happen, so they swooped in and bought Amiga corp--this abruptly ended their negotiations with Atari, and also for some reason meant the discontinuation of its entire line of Amiga game controllers. So, in actual fact the Amiga was probably the REAL successor to the Atari 8-bit line as it shares much more heritage with the Atari 800 than the Atari ST does (with a similar design philosophy--right down to naming their projects after women...Pam, Colleen...Lorraine).
Of course, Tramiel was steamed that Commodore would do such a thing (and wasn't all that happy with Jay Miner and co eith
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...
Need Mercedes parts ?
If Cinerama had won the format wars each film since then would have required 66% more celluloid film to shoot and project, since the process required 3 cameras. This would have created an ecological disaster, with a shocking usage of 66% more toxic processing chemicals, not to mention stock. It is safe to say that the world would be a more polluted place had Cinerama won the format wars.
Also, the great revolution in American cinema occurred in the late 60's and early 70's -- not because of the largesse of projection (and encumberance of a huge 3 camera setup) but because of the nibleness of lighter, newer equipment and sensitive film stocks. The coarse reality that 70's cinema focused on truly changed society, and it simply couldn't have been done in Cinerama (think about it, could Easy Rider have captured what it captured with the encumberance of Cinerama?).
"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.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Every time I read an article about the Amiga, I get all misty eyed. C= managment need a special place in purgatory all of their own!
I can't help but think that the world would be a much better place if the Amiga had been sensibly managed. The Amiga user community was really great - much like the Linux community in many ways.