The Complete History of Format Wars 277
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."
Minidisc??? (Score:4, Informative)
Nick
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Re:Minidisc??? (Score:5, Informative)
Not a chance. Minidiscs have caddies, which made physical damage to the discs, or the drives, extremely unlikely. The format allowed for a million rewrite cycles, compared with CD-RW about 1,000, and the disc format was far more stable.
Re:Minidisc??? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Bullshit. Perhaps you're talking about the later ATRACv3 formats with it's low bitrates comparable with MP3, but the high bitrate ATRAC (v1/2) was entirely transparent.
Re:Minidisc??? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Minidisc??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Minidisc??? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Minidisc??? (Score:5, Informative)
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One more problem was that they charged a significant premium for the "data" disks, which were *exactly* the same as the music disks, only enabled via pre-recorded flags to be used for data purposes. I had a minidisc based 8-track recorder that used the data disks, and they were freaking expensive. Sold that puppy on Ebay.
I still have MD in my system, a Sony MD+CD player, because I own some interesting MD's (like a hand-signed Joe Satriani MD) but I certainly haven't been looking for new MDs, or recordin
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Marantz [d-mpro.com] has several of those, in rackmount and portable formats.
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I remember minidisc players having a moderate amount of success a few years back, because they were aimed at the right market. By targeting the personal stereo market, their advantages were played up (smaller than CDs, durable) and their disadvantages were played down (who really cares about sound quality when you're listening through earbuds?). The digital optical recording aspect was of its time, allowing near-perfect copies of CDs straight from the stereo, at a time when requiring a PC was still unacce
Minidisc? (Score:4, Informative)
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Shame that ATRAC sounds so nasty though, a decent 192 Kbps MP3 easily sounds just as good.
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Actually it's less than 5X higher than CD. And more to the point, I've never heard any credible source claim audible artifacts (with ATRAC v1/2), except as the result of crappy hardware that didn't encode ATRAC properly, which was unfortunately the case with at least RCA's models (IIRC).
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Minidisc (Score:3, Insightful)
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minidisc? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:minidisc? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Or the digital optical output.
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Very few portable MiniDisc devices -- possibly none of the models produced by Sony -- had digital optical output.
Great, more holy wars. (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Great, more holy wars. (Score:5, Funny)
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Er... the ST had separate graphics, sound and I/O processors as well. Ok, the graphic (less colors) and sound ( less channels if I remember) ones weren't as good as the amiga :) but on the other hand, the ST had high-res and midi i/o, which is why it was a great machine for DTP (Calamus) and music (Cubase), and why it
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Music - Atari pwned pro usage with it's MIDI support alone. Sound chip on the early Amiga's was better than Atari's of the same age. Amiga never really updated the sound whereas Atari did in later models. Right about the time both Amiga and Atari were becomming obsolete. I think Macs basically took this crown when they started offering MIDI support, though digital audio on Mac was on par with PC's; well behind both Atari and Amiga.
Graphics - Compare A
Re:Great, more holy wars. (Score:5, Informative)
The amiga had a separate sound processor that could play samples through hardware. The atari ST could only do it through heavy CPU usage (about 30% to play an amiga mod).
The amiga had a separate graphics processor - the blitter. The ST didn't get that until the STe, and nobody made any software for it, ever. The graphics chip could also do hardware sprites (the ST had no such thing), hardware scrolling playfields (the ST had no such thing), and HAM, which effectively used the hardware to muck about with the palette. The ST could do this in software if you could be arsed.
The amiga had a separate "io" chip - the copper, which could be used to control the chips above without the CPU intervening. The atari had no such thing.
As for midi IO, you could plug a gadget into the amiga that did this, and it didn't cost much at all. I'd like to see an STFM owner plugging in a hardware sprites chip.
I had an ST and an Amiga, and programmed both, and the Amiga was way more fun.
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As for midi IO, you could plug a gadget into the amiga that did this, and it didn't cost much at all. I'd like to see an STFM owner plugging in a hardware sprites chip.
This could be handled in two ways on the Amiga, as well.
One way was to actually plug it right into the serial port, which has a 31,250 speed specifically for the purpose. Little hardware was actually involved. But there are also a zillion devices that plug into the amiga's parallel port, which was kind of like a predecessor to the BeBox's Geekport in that it was highly configurable. Each main I/O line can be configured as an output or an input (or you can toggle them all or some of them back and forth.)
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Right, and I believe you loaded sprite and sound instructions into it as a sort of multimedia script, which then ran independently of the main CPU. That's why you could often find an Amiga locked up solid but with the sound and sometimes sprite animations still happily running. There's no way they could have done Dragon's Lair without all the co-processors.
You also forgot to menti
Re:Great, more holy wars. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Indeed, nor did the Mac ever have pre-emptive multitasking (only when they ditched MacOS for OS X), and it only appeared in Windows IIRC in 95.
It's interesting the way that so many of the Amiga's features which were looked down upon as being pointless or "toy" features were later touted as being wonderful features in other OSs.
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It's interesting the way that so many of the Amiga's features which were looked down upon as being pointless or "toy" features were later touted as being wonderful features in other OSs.
Hey, Acorn RISC OS users will still tell you that you don't need pre-emptive multi-tasking [acornusers.org], and that it's just for lazy developers. Of course, they then wonder why they don't have an RDBMS like mySQL [acornusers.org] available on their platform.
They'll get there one day. Bless 'em :-)
No need to RTFA (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks for the heads up.
Obvously the article is written by a drooling moron. No need to waste time on this.
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Re:No need to RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
8-track tapes... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:8-track tapes... (Score:4, Insightful)
Similarly, the article overlooks why there were tons of VHS tapes at video rental stores. Early on in the format war you had some of both. It was only after VHS won that Betamax started to fall off. While the article does mention that adult entertainment played a role in the fall of Betamax, what really did it in was the recording time. With VHS able to record 2 hours, then 4 hours, and eventually 6 hours (!) it was a lot more useful to home viewers who wanted to record their favorite television show. The quality was a non-issue because nearly everyone had rabbit-ears or rooftop antennas. With the cruddy quality of over-the-air transmissions, why would anyone worry about "better color response"?
Furthermore, I find the article's implication that a world without Mac OS X and iPods would be somehow "better" than the situation today to be... a bit disturbing. Putting aside for a moment that NEXTSTEP was just as good of a choice (perhaps better?) than BeOS, without the market push from Job's and Apple, we'd still be waiting for the ability to purchase music and television online. Technology would be potentially held back by as much as a decade due to the short-sightedness of the media conglomerates.
Waste of bandwidth (Score:2)
Re:Waste of bandwidth (Score:4, Funny)
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Ahh, Privoxy [privoxy.org].
Step three, profit (Score:4, Insightful)
2) Put advertising on all ten pages, post link to Slashdot
3) Profit.
Straight wrong on the Atari (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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Back then computers were still divided into "home" computers and business computers, and Atari and Amiga were placed in the "home" category because of the games (and color, hi-res graphics, audio, etc...). They were never really taken that seriously by business which really hurt their market share.
Amiga was really hurt too because not many people bou
8-Track? You are SO high (Score:4, Funny)
Now get the hell off my lawn...
Re:8-Track? You are SO high (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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No, that would be the cassette tape and the WalkMan.
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Really weird conclusions (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Absolutely right (Score:5, Funny)
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(Yawn) Sour grapes, overenthusiasm... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Article is trash (Score:2)
"The copy protection is good too, which means less of that pesky piracy the music industry keeps banging on about." - From the SACD/DVD-Audio page.
Oh yeah, everybody wants that. The only SACD player I ever saw didn't have a digital output, apparently because the standard didn't allow it due to copy fears. You had to connect a block of six analog outputs. Genius!
"Later on, further innovation came with the NetMD range, which allowed you to copy music on your computer to a MiniDisc at high speeds. M
8-Track? And a couple of other mistakes. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Some right, mostly wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You're spot-on with VHS vs Beta. I remember getting my hands on a pirated version of Star Wars on BetaMax-- which took 3-4 tapes. Swapping out tapes in the middle of a movie? No thanks, I'll take VHS.
And I wouldn't say DTS has lost
8-track? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Blah (Score:2)
It does. In fact they're really just listing the POSITIVE traits for any failed technologies, and ignoring the negatives. However, the ones listed in the summary aren't spectacular at all.
If Apple bought BeOS, instead of NEXT, they wouldn't have gotten Steve Jobs back in the deal. Certainly, that would have meant huge changes. Even if they still introduced the iMac and
Atari ST (Score:2, Flamebait)
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Re:Atari ST (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
So much bad information (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I preferred the LotR in DTS (Score:2)
Sponsored by Sony? (Score:2)
Boom boom.
Back in My day... (Score:2, Informative)
But really, 8-track?
My own observations (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:My own observations (Score:4, Informative)
DRM most certainly is the reason for HD audio's lackluster adoption. Sony hobbled MiniDiscs in the name of the almighty content protection as well.
I used to work in television in the '90s and indeed, we used those cart machines.. they were great for that purpose, but I wholeheartedly agree that the 8-track was as buggy as heck. I remember having one in our family car when I was little... I seem to recall the tapes wearing out rather quickly.
As to the ST, YEAH! I was a dedicated Atari fan with my 1040STfm. I'd say that here in the states, Atari just dropped the ball. They did indeed have the better computer for getting things done, but everyone just too closely associated the name Atari with games. We had a strange situation where the Gamers favored the Amiga over the Atari on game availability and quality, while business folks never took it seriously because they so closely associated Atari with video games from the arcade and the 2600 consoles. Atari pretty much gave up on the US to the point where I had to mail order my software from Europe before finally giving up.
LD vs VHS (Score:2)
While pre-recorded VHS tapes were as cheap as chips, Laserdiscs were $50 each.
Except when pre-recorded VHS tapes never dropped below the "$99 priced for rental" level, while the letterboxed LD was available for $20-35...
misleading title (Score:2)
The title should have read The Complete History of A/V Format Wars. Here I thought that it was going to document such things as CDF [w3.org] versus RSS [harvard.edu] versus Atom [ietf.org].
ST was better for music... (Score:2)
Re:ST was better for music... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Second, what does TOS stand for? Is it a takeoff on DOS, or POS?
That is, is it a 'Tari Operating System, or a 'Tari of Shit?*
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Proud former owner of an Atari Mega ST 2.
Atari ST vs. Amiga (Score:5, Informative)
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
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I remember trying to produce a CV on WordWorth using a Commodore MPS 1230 printer. It was an exercise in pain and suffering. Partly that was the due to the word processor, partly due to the shockingly bad font and printer support in AmigaOS, and partly due to the printer itself. Windows 3.1 may have sucked for all s
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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.
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The funny part is that the PS3 still supports SACD. There is still a chance for Sony to turn their lemon into lemonade if they start making more CDs as hybrid SACDs.
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Now, in September 1999, what was the state of the competition. Windows Me still wasn't released, and neither was Windows 2000. Mac OS was still version 8.5. BeOS 4.5 at this stage was the most advance
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That's REAL revenue baby! Eyeballs - look at all those eyeballs! HA - take that
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Much superior technology, loved by nerds, totally crushed...I owned an Amiga and that experience has made me more conservative about embracing new computer technology.
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I really feel sorry for someone that is so insecure they have to do something like that to get attention.
(And it's because of tiny minds like the poster's that I took the weekend off and read it all before exposing myself to any media again.)
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Yes. it makes you long for a '-1, Pointless loser' moderation option.
Although if we're asking, I'd still want '-1, User Friendly link' before that one.