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."

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?

[evilviper]

Compression on minidisc is about 10x higher compared to CD and even I can hear it.

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).

Really weird conclusions

[91degrees]

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.

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:Waste of bandwidth

[Tau Neutrino]

Yeah, the huge cutesy illustrations are a bit much. But ads? What ads?

Ahh, Privoxy [privoxy.org].

8-track?

[hcdejong]

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.

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:A bit silly

[wile_e_wonka]

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.]

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:Great, more holy wars.

[mdwh2]

The Amiga also had true multitasking - the ST didn't.

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.

Re:Minidisc???

[Rageon]

I disagree, I loved Minidisc. I was a DJ for years, and Minidiscs were pretty much the coolest thing ever, as they allowed me to make "mix CD's" so that I wouldn't have to lug hundreds and hundreds of CD's from job to job. And the fact they were more or less indestructible was great. But granted, that's a pretty specific use. As far as MDs being of lower quality, ummm, anyone ever heard of the iPod? People today are buying music with crappy quality, so I'm not sure that argument works. Lossy formats will always drive hardcore audiophiles (of which I consider myself) crazy, but for people out there without thousands to spend on speakers, processors, and amps, quality of the recording isn't the weak link in the chain, so it really doesn't matter. If someone is listening to their shelf system with 5 watt, 3 inch "full range!" speakers, the difference between CD, MP3, and MD is essentially non existent.

Re:Minidisc???

[eudaemon]

Minidiscs were king in the field reporting / radio reporting / interview world for a long time.

Any recordable minidisc player was an excellent portable interview platform, and the autoindexing
made playback a breeze.

These days I see interviewing bloggers using solid state devices such as the Roland Edirol R-4.
And since the latest Edirols can be backed up to USB 2.0 flash devices in the field,
you essentially have the unlimited media a minidics offers, albeit a little more slowly
than a minidisc change.

Minidiscs are still indispensable for boots from the front-of-house (read: inside the area
where the event is happening) sound board.

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.