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
Minidisc? (Score:4, Informative)
8-track tapes... (Score:4, Informative)
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:Great, more holy wars. (Score:2, Informative)
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 was used as such. Strangely the ST was marketized as a game machine in the uk, but afaik more used as a pro/dtp machine in germany, and in france a bit in between (eg, bastardized. Lots of missed opportunities).
I'm curious about your claim about using a DSP in an amiga 500 though.
Now if you are not talking about later amiga... may I remind you the Atari TT030 (I still have one), a really great machine (68030, vga, possibility to plug in a 1280x960 monochrome display... told you, DTP..), and the Falcon030, which technically was indeed a really cool thing (DSP56001, etc).
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.
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.
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:Minidisc??? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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
Re:Minidisc??? (Score:3, Informative)
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 recording onto them.
What I'd really like is a memory stick / card / flash / whatever music recording/playback system in a hi-fi equipment format. Wouldn't mind a rackmount version, either.
The holy grail (for me) isn't here yet, though. That'd be a recording/playback system that was wireless and plugless; no wear on connectors, no cables to manage, etc. Just talks to the receiver via some variety of wireless and records and plays back that way to either the receiver or wireless 'phones, practical ultracaps for power so you'd never have a dead battery, recharges on a mat so again you never have to plug it into anything. That'd be so sweet...
Re:Minidisc??? (Score:3, Informative)
Marantz [d-mpro.com] has several of those, in rackmount and portable formats.