The Amiga was superior to just about everything else at the time. You could run different format windows at the same time. Even today the entire screen on all other machines have to be all one format.
One of the things that killed the Betamax was licensing. Just like IBM tried to force PC card manufacturers to pay licensing to create Micro-Channel Architecture cards for their IBM PCs, Sony was charging Betamax clone and tape manufacturers a fee to make their products, while Toshiba pretty much opened up the VHS licensing. As such, that helped provide the kiss of death to Betamax.
Was going to mention this; it's part of what contributed to the higher cost of Betamax. It's tough to say whether it was the price or the recording time that gave VHS the edge, but the combination of those two advantages certainly didn't hurt it.
Another format war was automobiles. The format war was gasoline vs. steam vs. battery. No, I am not talking about now but at the beginning of the use of automobiles. Gasoline won because steam took too long to get going and was notorious for blowing up (steam pressure) AND battery took too long to charge and had too small of a range of travel.
Lately the format war - given the widespread understanding among everyone but a few ideological die-hards that the days of ICE are numbered - is between battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell, with battery electric enjoying a strong and seemingly insurmountable lead at present, but with hydrogen fuel cell showing promise in larger-scale and longer-range applications such as long-haul trucking and ferry boats. (We're getting our first fuel-cell-powered ferry in the San Francisco Bay right about now.) In this case, they're not necessarily incompatible and can easily be used in combination, but that doesn't prevent fans on both sides from getting super-partisan about it.
Jack Decker Also, distribution systems increasingly used AC and electric car batteries required DC. DC was difficult and expensive to derive from AC at that time.
@@dwc1964 whether you are for or against electric cars, the fact remains that if we all had one the only way to charge them would be to build more nuclear power stations, personally I think burning oil is safer.
@@whatyousaidbud I disagree with every single thing you've said. 1. Even if every automobile were battery powered, it would not increase aggregate electrical demand the way the anti-EV talking points say. For one thing - out of many - they fail to take into account the large amounts of electricity required to refine oil into gasoline, that will no longer be happening. 2. Static storage batteries exist, so the argument that the intermittency of solar, wind, etc. is a fatal flaw is invalid. 3. While I'm extremely skeptical of atomic fission as an energy source, the reality of global warming & climate change due to the (in geological time) instantaneous release of carbon that had been previously buried miles underground for hundreds of thousands or millions of years - that reality is upon us. And as such, I'm starting to soften my anti-nuke stance somewhat. Though I still think solar, wind, etc. are a better solution.
It's the fact you can step it up and down with a transformer. When going long distances, step it up to high voltages to have less loss in the wire, then step it down at the other end. Can't easily do that with DC.
@@puncheex2 High voltage DC transmission is used for long undersea cables where the losses from capacitance with the surroundings would be excessive for AC. The extra complication in generating the HV DC and converting it back to AC at the destination are justified by the lower transmission losses. But AC is much easier to handle with transformers in transmission networks. The idea of 'lower losses' with AC is, I think, because high voltage AC is easily produced, whereas DC tends to be lower voltage, hence requires higher currents (for the same power), hence higher resistance losses in the cables.
@@cr10001 high voltage long distance transmission lines overland are also DC in the US. Impedance losses above "x" voltage exceed resistance voltage and makes the investment in the equipment to convert to AC worth it. In addition with high voltage AC you have the issues with inductance losses. The first high voltage AC line put in to NY had people injured and killed when they completed the circuit using their bodies to metal sheds and fences adjacent to the power lines. NYSEG (whatever it was back then) paid a small fortune going back and grounding everything metal along the transmission line. Of course people being people also started running parallel wires to steal power intentionally. Local grids AC is preferable since as you said its easy to convert to the desired voltage, a lighter gage wire can be used since you can toss a transformer about anywhere you want to step down the voltage allowing local grids to operate at medium voltage of 30kv or so and stepped down to the needed voltage adjacent at the point of use.
Very nice. You forgot Polaroid and Kodak Instant. Polaroid certainly got there first, but Kodak’s film and resolution was better. Combined with their “trimprint” that allowed consumers to remove the picture from the plastic backing and treat this as a regular picture was a bonus - and something the Polaroids could not do. Who won? Well in 1985 Polaroid sued Kodak on copyright (patent ) grounds and filed an injunction to stop Kodak selling the film and cameras until the lawsuit was finalized. Kodak realized that while they might win they would lose millions defending their separate patents and with cameras and film rotting in warehouses, Kodak acquiesced and dropped the whole product line.
No sir. They did not. As I said Polaroid sued Kodak for Patent infringement and then filed an injunction preventing Kodak from both making and distributing their "instant" film and cameras until the lawsuit was complete. Once Kodak complied and removed them from shelves (or actually, me and my hard-working staff), Polaroid felt -- and perhaps rightly so -- that they had won and did not pursue the suit any further. As well Kodak was forced to give recompense to all owners of the cameras which cost them millions Thus, the case never went to court and no monetary awards were allocated (aside from the above). Two things on this. One. Polaroid never sued Kodak until the latter introduced the “Trimprint” version of their film that allowed customers to remove the photo from the backing once dry to have a regular picture. Polaroid never saw the Kodak film as a threat until then. Why? Two. There were many differences between the Polaroid and Kodak films, not the least of which was that the Kodak emulsion was exposed from the rear and Polaroid from the front. This allowed for “Trimprint” which was Kodak’s goal all along. Thus, due to this, I feel the Kodak film was different enough to not be a patent infringement, but alas, we will never know. However, the Kodak Instant does live on in film (pun intended). The photo the little boy takes and sells to Sarah Conner at the end of “The Terminator” was a Kodak Instant.
as an amateur audio engineer & transcoding nerd of 18yrs+ now, this episode was particularly entertaining for me.. thank you for all you do, TopTenz crew 💙 now if* it could only show up in my sub feed au'do-magically, instead of having to go search for it when TIFO goes up...
Don't forget, before the 8-track were the 4-track machines. My father's new Ford Country Squire wagon came with one... which neither my father or I ever used.
Who won Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD? Standard DVD, sure HD-DVD did fail, while Blu-Ray is still around, but - because they are cheaper, and still made - DVDs bought far more often than Blu-Rays, except by video-philes, who are a very niche market.
Well, the Blu Ray vs. HD-DVD war was won by the former, with Toshiba officially conceding the competition. The eventual withering of the Blu Ray market due to the meteoric rise of streaming services that was just around the corner is a separate thing, IMO.
DVD and Blu-Ray sort of merged. Those who don't mind paying a lot for a single use device may have a Blu-Ray player. Others have one by default in a game console. Everybody used to have a DVD player by default if they had a computer. But now you can even stream or download from the package.
Here's another format war that you probably never heard of... Laserdisc vs. CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc), or also known as videodisc The difference between the two? Laserdiscs are read optically with a laser beam while CEDs are read physically with a stylus similar to a phonograph record. The two systems are mutually incompatible; the CED was made obsolete by Laserdiscs by 1986.
I think the "brand name" of a CED was a Selectavision Disc. But that was the name used by RCA, the format inventor. Just like B Cord was Sanyo's name for Beta, there were alternate names.
I worked at Radio Shack. I couldn't tell you how many times I had to explain to people that an 8mm/hi-8 VCR tape adapter didn't exist like it did for VHS-C.
The Commodore Amiga 1000 was light years ahead of anything else when it debuted. It had GUI and a color monitor. Electronic Arts was founded to create games for it. Despite the emergence of Toaster, the Commodore Amiga died out by the mid '90s.
My Dad had a reel-to-reel audio recorder. I grew up with using them for school and hobby projects. Don't remember any commercial music being released on the format though. Cassettes essentially replaced them for public use, mainly due to portability. I think some pros still use them, same with video playback machines for tv studios and such. I think digital is practically taking over though now.
Forgot to mention Texas Instruments home computer TI-99 in the early 1980s. The company killed their desktop computer due to insisting on sticking to proprietary formats, maintaining a policy of discouraging hobbyists from making modifications and software companies had a hard time finding people who knew how to program using it's assembly language.
Ah you missed my favorite one. iPod v Zen player. The zen was what I had. I heard the reason iPod won out because they marketed toward school kids and gave some away. Then every other kid wanted what the other kids had. That’s genius if that’s true.
Jobs was a marketing genius. Stuck with some computers, donated them to schools. Kids learned how to use the apple, got out of school and had no idea how to run a pc so bought macs.
Vickie Vegas, I used to have a Zen creative player. I had it for a long time. It was great while it lasted. I finally gave it away to be recycled a few years ago.
that isn't necessarily a "format" war. I do believe both used MP3 format. All that would be is a brand war (apple vs pc), much like auto brands (gm vs ford vs chrysler vs all other manufacturing groups)
Alison Jordan I still have mine somewhere I saw it when I packed. It’s been two years since we moved so it’s probably packed in the garage somewhere. Yikes!
Within AC power the frequency was unsettled until as late as the late 1940’s. SCE and LADWP operated at 50 Hz. Six of the units at Hoover Dam were installed capable (I.e. wound) such that they could operate at 50 or 60 Hz. Likewise some of the early pumping stations in the Phoenix area operated at 25 Hz. Interconnected Grid operation for reliability forced it to go to 60 Hz (in North America).
True. And American (including South America??) domestic power is 110v 60Hz, whereas most of the rest of the world uses 230v 50Hz. This used to matter a lot more before modern solid-state digital devices which just use an input power supply circuit (which can usually handle either voltage) to drop the input power to their chosen DC voltage. Oh, and PAL vs NTSC TV formats.
GD vs. Vinyl LPs would have been very interesting since it looked like vinyl was completely dead. And now? Vinyl's in it for the long haul. CD's being squeezed out.
@@writerpatrick CDs in 80's and most of the 90's were extremely tinny and compressed. Although the mp3 listening soul today would think otherwise. I bought vinyl as much as possible in the 90's. And I am glad to see them back as a viable option. I bought another turntable two years ago.
The only place where there's a "war" over the first is in Japan. And it is a settled truce far more peaceful than on the Korean Peninsula. The second only come to clash with one another at the Hong Kong border crossing into China.
Ironically, my first introduction to the home pc was IBM where my school had a contract with them. As a field trip, we got to tour the headquarters and they supplied our school with 20 computers in my grade school. My personal first home computer was a Commadore 64, which I used as a gaming consol, which was extremely outdated because my friends were using Dreamcasts, Segas and Nintendo 64s. I also have a healthy collection of movies on VHS.
Then there was the corkscrew vs. double helix DNA format war of 5,000,000,000 BC. Critics of the Double Helix said the two helices were prone to getting tangled up together in early prototypes, and that the corkscrew format would be more reliable, but the double helix won because it could divide and the corkscrew could not.
Electricity travels at the speed of light period .... However higher voltages from AC transformers travel longer distances with less power loss - can Simon follow that?
With 8-track cartridges, you couldn't skip forward to the next song. The tape had 8 parallel tracks and the tape head would read two tracks at a time (for stereo). When you pressed the channel button to select the next of the 4 channels (2 tracks per channel * 4 channels = 8 tracks) -- and you could only select the channels sequentially from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 1 -- the playback head would move up or down the width of the tape to align with the next pair of tracks. So typically changing channels would put you somewhere in the middle of a song. The tape was one long loop with the end of the tape spliced to the beginning with a metal foil. When the foil passed a sensor, the heads would automatically move to the next channel. The song order would often be jumbled compared to the LP so as to equally fill up each channel as much as possible, otherwise you'd have a lot of silence (well, tape hiss) before you got around to that splice. This channel switching is very different from the track switching feature of CDs. In fact CD track switching is more similar to LPs. With LPs you could easily and quickly skip to another track by lifting the tonearm and moving it forward or backward. With practice you could become accurate at placing the stylus exactly at the start of a desired track (except perhaps on those albums that didn't have clear banding). Some 8-track players added a fast-forward feature, but of course due to how the tape was looped it wasn't possible to "rewind" the tape. AC is distributed at very high voltages because for the same power, the current will be less for higher voltage, and therefore there will be less power loss (which is proportional to the square of the current and the cable resistance). This is especially important as you distribute over long distances.
Betamax tapes could record for more than 60 minutes. I know because we had Betamax when I was a kid. You could get around 3 1/2 hours out of them, dependent on which tap s you had.
The Betamax couldn't record for more than 60 minutes when it came out. It took 2 or 3 years for them to make a longer recording version, maybe even 5. By the time they did, they had the reputation of only having short recording tapes. Then JVC came out with the 4 hour tape, plus it was cheaper. Betamax never really recovered, even though they kept at it for a number of years.
Years from now we will find out which subscription video streaming service wins, or which personal voice assistant wins (Siri, Alexa, or Google). It will be interesting to see.
You forgot about Tandy’s TRS-80, affectionately called the trash-80. The brand new computer lab at my high school (1980ish) was filled with 10 of those one piece jewels. 😝
Transmission of ac electric currents is not faster than dc current. They both "transmit" current at just under the speed of light. Edison coined the term electrocution as a combination of electricity and execution.
I found out a while back that the Three Gorges Damn produces DC at super high voltage for it's transmission lines, it's crazy, it goes against everything I've learned, I think it goes extreme distances without substations, have you learned anything about it?
@@bigredc222 the trouble with DC is that the wires themselves act as resistors and dissipates the power. Three Gorges operates at a 500 kilovolt range which reduces the effect of the wire resistance to a manageable level. If Edison had the capability to generate voltages that high we would probably have a DC distribution system in the US.
In 1976 I got a big bonus at work and paid 1000. for a monstrously sized Beta player. A year later a friend bought the same machine for 300. They weighed about 50 pounds.
I think even bigger then any of these, at least in the number of major players, was the war over early digital camera and camcorder storage formats. You had MMC vs SD vs CF vs xD vs Memory Stick vs XQD vs all the mini CD and hdd formats.
Anyone remember the mid-90s large-storage disk wars? For a few years, Iomega and NEC were pushing Zip drives and disks that stored 100 MB per disk, which were hot because floppies could only store 1.44 MB. There were other large-storage disk drives too, most notably Micron's SuperDisk, which could store up to 120 MB and was backwards compatible with 1.44 MB floppies, but thanks to better marketing the Zip drive won out. Then came the USB storage drive era and all those disk drives went down the drain.
I agree. I like hoarding digitally and having less physical stuff, and I regain most of the sense of ownership/permanence by making sure I have true copies of most files and can back them up myself instead of using the cloud too much ... But I still feel you on the way it's nice to have physical versions to actually handle and look at and curate.
I wish they mentioned fast food...yesterday I went to burger king and ordered a whooper. They forgot my cheese and all the condiments. This is why they will ALWAYS BE NUMBER 2!
BK isn't #2. Where I live I'm surprised they're still in business. And their recent "SJW" nonsense is likely losing them customers. Just Friday evening I drove past where there is a BK adjacent to a McD. The drive-thru for McD was full, BK's was empty and virtually no cars in the parking lot.
I was at Edison's Menlo Park lab, now located at Greenfield Village in Dearborn Michigan, in August 2018. I watched and listened to a very animated, passionate and talented museum presenter who was an obvious Edison fan, demonstrate and present the many "achievements" created at the Edison lab. I was part of a crowd of about 18 in the lab. When he asked the crowd the question if they really knew the story about how electricity was brought to the masses, I responded "Tesla and his Alternating Current did that!" Several in the little crowd to start vocally agreeing with me. When the increasingly frustrated presenter asked the visitors what other inventions they could name that Edison created? I responded, "Edison stole from Tesla, and invented patent trolling as a result!" I got the majority of the men, who easily made up 3/4 of in the crowd, suddenly giving me cheers and applause. Mic drop moment for me! Tesla made our current advanced technology possible. Tesla understood the fundamentals of radio waves, he was the inventor of radio, not Marconi. Tesla knew cell phone tech long before the first brick phones of the 80's. Edison never invented nor created a damned thing on his own. His brilliant staff, which briefly included Tesla, did all the experimenting, conceptualizing, innovating and creating, at which point Edison would simply file the patent on his employee's creations and take credit for himself, since he was the employer. Other than that, Edison was just another so-called 19th Century "robber-baron," a man of his Victorian times. Tesla was a man who was more than half a century ahead of his time, he is a man of the late 20th and the first half of the 21st Century, so far.
Young whippersnappers dont know a thing about 8track tape breaking, then taking the case apart and splicing the tape back together with the white repair tape.
I guess I'm not a young whippersnapper, though I was just a kid when 8-tracks were popular. I still remember hearing ads for music albums on TV say, "Available on LP, 8-track, or cassette."
@@writerpatrick Yeah, in the late 70's though whenever K-tel would release a "best of" album or something, at the end of the commercial they'd always say that. I think the 8-track part started dropping off in the early 80's because even though they were still around, cassettes killed 8-tracks.
meh VHS worked the same i remember having to splice VHS back together with scotch tape all the damn time. never had that problem with my 8-tracks, nope the tape in those always got stretched to a point of unusability
They weren't competing formats, though. NTSC came first. The inventors of PAL had the benefit of seeing the problems with NTSC, and built on that. It's not like Europe had a format war.
I had a Timex Sinclair, I got it for free when I bought living room furniture. It had a miniscule memory capacity and a problematic keyboard. I guess you could say it was worth what I paid for it.
That was what the Sinclair ZX80 was called in the US. I had the ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum (which was kind of an upgraded, colour version of the ZX's) Happy Days :-)
I agree wholeheartedly with your choices, but I was hoping to see Minidisk vs. Digital Audio Cassette. I remember a media push for DAC when I was in high school. Minidisk proved to be Superior and was used for field recording and other audio production work in the days before laptops and thumb drives became ubiquitous. Neither format ever caught on in the U.S. I'm not sure DAC ever caught on anywhere, while Minidisk remained popular in Japan well into the '00s.
There's a few others that haven't been included on this list. We tend to think of the battle between BluRay and HD DVD as the first videodisc format war, but it wasn't. In the early 80s Laserdisc hadn't really won over consumers, RCA launched a cheaper video disc system in it's CED Video Disc format. Basically movies on vinyl, although encased in a plastic caddy to protect the disc itself. It went head to head with Laserdisc, but back then consumers weren't really that interested in a non recordable format for movies as movies on VHS were good enough for our 21 inch CRT TVs, and of course we could record on blank VHS tapes too. CED died within a couple of years, while Laserdisc clung on even into the early 2000s positioning itself, once Pioneer took it over, as a format for serious movie collectors who wanted the highest quality for films at home. It stayed a niche format, but gained enough of a following for all of the big blockbuster films of the time to be released on the format. It was finally killed off by DVD, but not without a high definition version being launched in Japan to directly compete with DVD. A third videodisc format was also launched during that time, VED, although I don't think it made it out of Japan. Other notable format wars included the Minidisc vs DCC war of the early 90s, with minidisc winning but again not really becoming mainstream. Like Laserdisc it gained enough of a following in Europe and Japan to survive until fairly recently though, and still has an avid fan base with even new music being released on the format now and again.
@@lordgarion514 Lol. I think he was just saying that at their heart, they're just PC architectures. Currently Jaguar cores for CPU (based off of an old mobile CPU), and GCN architecture, originally based off of the 7000 series AMD GPU's. Obviously the Pro and X have updated GPU's, but still the same CPU's, just clocked higher.
You mentioned the format war between wax cylinders and records, but during the establishment of record disks there was yet another format war. Some companies such as RCA cut their record groves using side-to-side vibration, but other record companies cut groves in an up-and-down motion, known as the "hill and dale" format. The two were NOT compatible. If you bought a phonograph designed for hill-and-dale, rather like Apple wanting their own pool of i-tunes, you could only play hill-and-dale records stamped by the same company. The hill-and-dale cut proved to be inferior because the up and down motion of the needle caused records to wear out much faster than the competing side-to-side method. Hill-and-dale soon vanished as other companies pooled their patents and stamped "universal" records that could be played on any brand phonograph.
3:20 Hah, neither SACD or DVD-A made much of an impact in the grand scheme of things. That was one format war where the outcome was one format just taking a bit longer to disappear from the market. :D But SACD players not being cheap even today? Well, I'm not sure if it can be called an _SACD player_ in the scrictest sense of the word, but earlier this year I picked up a Samsung DVD-HD945, a DVD player with SACD playback, for a whopping 30€ at a local thrift store. I have _no_ idea if I'll ever even have SACDs in my record collection, but hey, it's a nifty feature to have just in case! :D A nice bonus on top of it being a slick looking DVD player with a nice selection of output options.
While Microsoft and Apple are both very successful in the computer Market, the fact remains that Microsoft has been consistently ahead in that field for decades so even though Apple's Macintosh is still around I think it's pretty clear that Microsoft Windows is actually the clear winner.
There is one thing that you didn't mention. While Tesla and Westinghouse won the current war for homes and businesses, Edison didn't lose entirely either. How? DC is the electrical technology in Motor Vehicles, Boats, Planes, Electronics (you may plug your electronics into a electrical outlet, but they use a converter to convert 120/240VAC to 6-24VDC).
And LED lighting. Remember how people who wanted to hang onto incandescents used to complain about imagined flicker in CFLs that were switched at 20-40 kHz?
Actually, the standard L500 Betamax tapes ran to 120 minutes at BII speed and 210 minutes at BIII speed. Later, longer tapes could run as long as 5 hours. After Sony withdrew Beta from the consumer market, it went on successfully as a professional format for many years, even after VHS ceased to exist.
Good video. A few things you missed. First there has been a lot of technology since the original current wars. Today it is as efficient to transmit DC as AC and perhaps more so because of inductive and capacitive losses in the long power lines. Also AC and DC are equally deadly at the same voltage and current levels. Other format wars took place the CBS rotating disk color TV format vs the NTSC electronic color TV format, HD and digital radio formats, and numerous HDTV technologies and formats.
Another thing of note in the early computer wars: Apple made their schematics widely available so many clones appeared making Apple more popular. IBM kept theirs confidential. Later Apple designs were kept confidential but IBM clones became commonplace. IBM effectively lost the home computer war by giving away their OS, although they still produce business computers.
Ac and DC travel at exactly the same speed. The difference is that DC tends to lose so much over a relatively short distance. It would have required a power plant every couple of miles. One big format war you overlooked was the Ethernet vs Token Ring. Ethernet was invented by Bob Metcalf and championed by 3Com (among others). Token Ring was pushed by IBM. While both worked Ethernet was easier for most people to understand. It also ended up much less expensive. Today most computers have it built in.
OK, I have a more obscure format war. In the 60's when China was spreading to other countries, a new way of writing the Chinese language was needed for English speaking people. So two formats were competing: Pinyin and Wade-Giles. Pinyin won out and now the Wade-Giles system is forgotten; Pinyin remains the letter form of Mandarin Chinese when English speaking people learn to speak and write it.
LPs and 45s. Although not really a "war" per se, but they tried to make it one. The LP was invented in 1948 by Columbia Records and the 45 by RCA Victor. RCA figured they could out do everyone else simply because they had most of the world's greatest artists on their label. Columbia figured the world was ready for a record that could hold 30 minutes of music. The public responded by not buying either one. A year later the companies decided to release the licensing rights to all record companies so all could benefit. (imagine that!) As it turned out, there was no format war. The two formats did not compete with each other. Adults preferred the LP, the kids and jukebox companies preferred the 45. By that time they knew the 78 format was getting obsolete. It had been around for 50 years and it was time to move on. The LP and 45 held their position for 35 years. It was a good run!
Excellent comment! It's worth adding that RCA's 7" product had a different size spindle hole to make it incompatible with everything except their own players. RCA also put a great deal of effort into designing automatic record changers that could very quickly change discs so that longer pieces of music could be listened to without significant breaks (the differenc in playing time being the major difference between the two formats). There is a (probably apocryphal) story that 45 rpm was selected mainly to be different from the 33rpm of Columbia's format and even that 45 was chosen because it is midway between 78 and 33 - sounds very unlikely! (The origins of the original 78rpm speed are not very well understood and some of the explanations for it not very credible eg 78rpm was the speed you got when joining commonly available motors and gears to rotate the turntable). A further ironic twist is that the current resurgence of vinyl sees many 'audiophile' albums being issued on 12" discs that play at 45rpm.
@@rolandbogush2594 👍 Thx for the cool comments. You have a keen interest in recording. There's a book, it's the definitive "bible" of the recording industry. "From Tinfoil to Stereo" (c. 1959) by Oliver Reed & Walter Welch. It's a 500+ page book of extremely fine print in double columns that has all that information. (not to be confused with Welch's "acoustic years" edition of the same title) The 33 rpm was used for the LP because it had already been used successfully for radio transcriptions as far back as 1928. They just stuck with it. The 45 came about mathematically. The longest 12" 78 ran for just over 5 minutes. RCA engineers figured the groove size (for maximum fidelity minimal distortion) and the 7" diameter to get the 5.5 minutes. The result was around 45 rpm. (from chapter 22, 'the war of the speeds' ) The 78 had it's own reasons but I'd have to reread half the book to get it. I know Edison disks were 80 rpm. I do remember the book mentioned an exact 78 rpm was almost impossible because of the limited technology. Voltage fluctuated, ac frequency wasn't perfect, etc. In fact, recording engineers often used spring or gravity powered motors for recording because it was easier to control. That book was written in 1959. I consider that information to a very reliable source. Surviving documents, memos, and personnel (1st hand interviews) were still available at that time.
@@rolandbogush2594 Here's some information on the changing speed of the 45 players. The first year of RCA's 45 changer (model 9JY) was able to to do a complete cycle in one revolution. The problem with that is it puts a substantial load on the drive roller since the changer mech was driven from the rotating platter. I rebuilt one of those a few years ago and even with new roller it still barely functioned. In 1951 the mech was changed so it took 2 revolutions to cycle. The new RP-190 was a substantial improvement in reliability and appearance. The RP-190 was actually manufactured by the Crescent Phonograph Co. of Chicago to RCA's specifications. Another book you would like is "The Fabulous Victrola 45" by Phil Vourtsis. That just covers RCA's 45 player.
The RCA CED format, it actually was released after the Laserdisc. It never achieved enough popularity to become a true format war (especially since at the times, video discs were a very niche market).
One of the biggest reasons why HD-DVD failed so hard is that unlike Blu-Ray on the PS3 you had to buy a separate external drive for the XBOX 360 at the cost of an extra $120 USD.
from 2013 to 2016 i still think that apple devices is great for its price... in 2019 i had no reason to like apple devices anymore. but apple is formidable as a company... they went ahead battling Google android with the left hand and Microsoft Windows on the right hand
Windows was rubbish compared to IBM's OS/2, but Windows defeated OS/2 because you had to buy and install OS/2 yourself. This was truly a case of the worst product winning a format war.
it's sad...mobile technology like that still has a long ways to go before it catches up with that of our desktops and laptops, but it's clear that the days of the desktop and laptop are limited
Beta was capeable of 4 hour play, with an LP (long play) setting, when VHS was still running at 2 hours. VHS did eventually incorporate the same type of setting, but Beta remained the superior system.
No, DC voltage cannot be changed, and that kills it for grid use. Transmitting power over wires depends on the ability to move the voltage/current ratio up and down. Yes, devices use DC, but that involves using a transformer before converting it to DC.
@@puncheex2 I never specified grid use, I specified use for personal electronics and last time I checked your PC doesn't use AC power, it's rectified to DC before actually going to your components. You're not getting AC power off a SATA power cable. *DC voltage cannot be changed, and that kills it for grid use.* This is demonstrably false. How do you think that you have multiple power rails in electronics? How do you think USB car chargers work? USB runs at 5v but that car socket puts out 12v so if your claim is true then USB car chargers should be blowing up any phone plugged into it as it's overvolting it by more than 2x. DC to DC converters can be made for hobbyist electronic projects for a few dollars with off the shelf components. Hell how do you think Qualcomm Quickcharge works? It modifies the voltage pretty much on the fly. Yes, it's harder to change DC voltage but not impossible, and DC power is already seeing limited and expanding grid use today.
Commodore was my first computer first I had the VIC 20, then the 64 and the last one I had was the 128. First I started with tape for a storage device then eventually a floppy drive.
12:45 Nope, printers could be exchanged between different computers. The only question of compatibility was whether you were using a RS232 serial interface or a centronics parallel interface.
Beta had fewer video artifacts, and it's hi-fi sound would never "Untrack" as VHS did. Beta was techincally superior, but people wanted cheap stuff that preformed worse.
You forgot to mention that DC is still used for most vehicle electronics and nearly all computers and mobile devices. That big “brick” charger for your laptop/mobile is simple converting AC to DC.
It's a niche audiophile thing but yeah, they're still around along with Blu-Ray Audio (DVD-A's spiritual successor). I own several of both format and (you guessed it) a nice Sony Blu-Ray player.
There is a difference between DIVX and DivX.
The failed alternative disk by Circuit City was DIVX.
The other one is a compressed file format.
Thanks. This confused me quite a bit.
Yeah, that logo is for the video codec, DivX...
Commodore64 then the Amiga. Growing up in the 80's. Great memories 👍
The Amiga was superior to just about everything else at the time. You could run different format windows at the same time. Even today the entire screen on all other machines have to be all one format.
One of the things that killed the Betamax was licensing. Just like IBM tried to force PC card manufacturers to pay licensing to create Micro-Channel Architecture cards for their IBM PCs, Sony was charging Betamax clone and tape manufacturers a fee to make their products, while Toshiba pretty much opened up the VHS licensing. As such, that helped provide the kiss of death to Betamax.
Was going to mention this; it's part of what contributed to the higher cost of Betamax. It's tough to say whether it was the price or the recording time that gave VHS the edge, but the combination of those two advantages certainly didn't hurt it.
Another format war was automobiles. The format war was gasoline vs. steam vs. battery. No, I am not talking about now but at the beginning of the use of automobiles. Gasoline won because steam took too long to get going and was notorious for blowing up (steam pressure) AND battery took too long to charge and had too small of a range of travel.
People forget that some of the earliest cars were electric.
Lately the format war - given the widespread understanding among everyone but a few ideological die-hards that the days of ICE are numbered - is between battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell, with battery electric enjoying a strong and seemingly insurmountable lead at present, but with hydrogen fuel cell showing promise in larger-scale and longer-range applications such as long-haul trucking and ferry boats. (We're getting our first fuel-cell-powered ferry in the San Francisco Bay right about now.)
In this case, they're not necessarily incompatible and can easily be used in combination, but that doesn't prevent fans on both sides from getting super-partisan about it.
Jack Decker Also, distribution systems increasingly used AC and electric car batteries required DC. DC was difficult and expensive to derive from AC at that time.
@@dwc1964 whether you are for or against electric cars, the fact remains that if we all had one the only way to charge them would be to build more nuclear power stations, personally I think burning oil is safer.
@@whatyousaidbud I disagree with every single thing you've said.
1. Even if every automobile were battery powered, it would not increase aggregate electrical demand the way the anti-EV talking points say. For one thing - out of many - they fail to take into account the large amounts of electricity required to refine oil into gasoline, that will no longer be happening.
2. Static storage batteries exist, so the argument that the intermittency of solar, wind, etc. is a fatal flaw is invalid.
3. While I'm extremely skeptical of atomic fission as an energy source, the reality of global warming & climate change due to the (in geological time) instantaneous release of carbon that had been previously buried miles underground for hundreds of thousands or millions of years - that reality is upon us. And as such, I'm starting to soften my anti-nuke stance somewhat. Though I still think solar, wind, etc. are a better solution.
I thought AC was better for transmitting over long distance with less loss, not cause it was "faster"?
It's the fact you can step it up and down with a transformer. When going long distances, step it up to high voltages to have less loss in the wire, then step it down at the other end. Can't easily do that with DC.
@@puncheex2 High voltage DC transmission is used for long undersea cables where the losses from capacitance with the surroundings would be excessive for AC. The extra complication in generating the HV DC and converting it back to AC at the destination are justified by the lower transmission losses. But AC is much easier to handle with transformers in transmission networks.
The idea of 'lower losses' with AC is, I think, because high voltage AC is easily produced, whereas DC tends to be lower voltage, hence requires higher currents (for the same power), hence higher resistance losses in the cables.
@@cr10001 high voltage long distance transmission lines overland are also DC in the US. Impedance losses above "x" voltage exceed resistance voltage and makes the investment in the equipment to convert to AC worth it.
In addition with high voltage AC you have the issues with inductance losses. The first high voltage AC line put in to NY had people injured and killed when they completed the circuit using their bodies to metal sheds and fences adjacent to the power lines. NYSEG (whatever it was back then) paid a small fortune going back and grounding everything metal along the transmission line. Of course people being people also started running parallel wires to steal power intentionally.
Local grids AC is preferable since as you said its easy to convert to the desired voltage, a lighter gage wire can be used since you can toss a transformer about anywhere you want to step down the voltage allowing local grids to operate at medium voltage of 30kv or so and stepped down to the needed voltage adjacent at the point of use.
Very nice. You forgot Polaroid and Kodak Instant. Polaroid certainly got there first, but Kodak’s film and resolution was better. Combined with their “trimprint” that allowed consumers to remove the picture from the plastic backing and treat this as a regular picture was a bonus - and something the Polaroids could not do.
Who won? Well in 1985 Polaroid sued Kodak on copyright (patent ) grounds and filed an injunction to stop Kodak selling the film and cameras until the lawsuit was finalized. Kodak realized that while they might win they would lose millions defending their separate patents and with cameras and film rotting in warehouses, Kodak acquiesced and dropped the whole product line.
No sir. They did not. As I said Polaroid sued Kodak for Patent infringement and then filed an injunction preventing Kodak from both making and distributing their "instant" film and cameras until the lawsuit was complete. Once Kodak complied and removed them from shelves (or actually, me and my hard-working staff), Polaroid felt -- and perhaps rightly so -- that they had won and did not pursue the suit any further. As well Kodak was forced to give recompense to all owners of the cameras which cost them millions
Thus, the case never went to court and no monetary awards were allocated (aside from the above).
Two things on this. One. Polaroid never sued Kodak until the latter introduced the “Trimprint” version of their film that allowed customers to remove the photo from the backing once dry to have a regular picture. Polaroid never saw the Kodak film as a threat until then. Why?
Two. There were many differences between the Polaroid and Kodak films, not the least of which was that the Kodak emulsion was exposed from the rear and Polaroid from the front. This allowed for “Trimprint” which was Kodak’s goal all along. Thus, due to this, I feel the Kodak film was different enough to not be a patent infringement, but alas, we will never know.
However, the Kodak Instant does live on in film (pun intended). The photo the little boy takes and sells to Sarah Conner at the end of “The Terminator” was a Kodak Instant.
The satisfaction of popping the copy protection tabs on a new cassette/VHS tape though..
And then later putting electrical tape over the hole when you wanted to tape over that VHS.
as an amateur audio engineer & transcoding nerd of 18yrs+ now, this episode was particularly entertaining for me.. thank you for all you do, TopTenz crew 💙
now if* it could only show up in my sub feed au'do-magically, instead of having to go search for it when TIFO goes up...
a mac is now just a pc (Same Internal x86 architecture since 2006) running a bsd unix system with a lot of linux GNU free software under GPL licence
Don't forget, before the 8-track were the 4-track machines. My father's new Ford Country Squire wagon came with one... which neither my father or I ever used.
When I was growing up we had a stereo with 8-track capability. To this day I'll never forget the sound of the 8-track changing channels. kachunk!
Not to mention that reel-to-reel preceded cassettes.
Sony has been involved in so many format wars...
Who won Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD? Standard DVD, sure HD-DVD did fail, while Blu-Ray is still around, but - because they are cheaper, and still made - DVDs bought far more often than Blu-Rays, except by video-philes, who are a very niche market.
Well, the Blu Ray vs. HD-DVD war was won by the former, with Toshiba officially conceding the competition. The eventual withering of the Blu Ray market due to the meteoric rise of streaming services that was just around the corner is a separate thing, IMO.
I still find it interesting that standard DVD is still being manufactured and sold in 2019.
And considering that many movies nowadays are either a 3-package BluRay/DVD/Digital or a 4-package that includes 4K, I don't see DVDs going anywhere.
DVD and Blu-Ray sort of merged. Those who don't mind paying a lot for a single use device may have a Blu-Ray player. Others have one by default in a game console. Everybody used to have a DVD player by default if they had a computer. But now you can even stream or download from the package.
@@collectingonthecheap56353 It's probably because they still sell well, while Blu-Ray never hit the mainstream market
Here's another format war that you probably never heard of...
Laserdisc vs. CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc), or also known as videodisc
The difference between the two? Laserdiscs are read optically with a laser beam while CEDs are read physically with a stylus similar to a phonograph record. The two systems are mutually incompatible; the CED was made obsolete by Laserdiscs by 1986.
I think the "brand name" of a
CED was a Selectavision Disc. But that was the name used by RCA, the format inventor. Just like B Cord was Sanyo's name for Beta, there were alternate names.
I worked at Radio Shack. I couldn't tell you how many times I had to explain to people that an 8mm/hi-8 VCR tape adapter didn't exist like it did for VHS-C.
And how many times did you ask for a customer's phone number when they came in to buy, say, just batteries?
Ian Colquhoun - Same here!
I recently read up on the format war that occurred over railway gauges, specifically in the UK during the 19th century.
When the railroad gauge in the southern US was changed to standard gauge. ruclips.net/video/4v81Gwu6BTE/видео.html
@@demoscat Thank you!!
I still my Commodore 64 and Colt. I liked the 64 for games and the Colt for productivity. Also, programming was easy to learn on the 64.
The Commodore Amiga 1000 was light years ahead of anything else when it debuted. It had GUI and a color monitor. Electronic Arts was founded to create games for it. Despite the emergence of Toaster, the Commodore Amiga died out by the mid '90s.
Does anyone remember Video Disks (they were large and not compact) and reel-to-reel sound?
RCA had the CED discs and I can't recall the other format. Both were inferior to the laserdisc.
My Dad had a reel-to-reel audio recorder. I grew up with using them for school and hobby projects. Don't remember any commercial music being released on the format though. Cassettes essentially replaced them for public use, mainly due to portability. I think some pros still use them, same with video playback machines for tv studios and such. I think digital is practically taking over though now.
Forgot to mention Texas Instruments home computer TI-99 in the early 1980s.
The company killed their desktop computer due to insisting on sticking to proprietary formats, maintaining a policy of discouraging hobbyists from making modifications and software companies had a hard time finding people who knew how to program using it's assembly language.
Nine out of Ten elephants prefer Tesla-Westinghouse! Vote NO on Edison!
LMAO
Ah you missed my favorite one. iPod v Zen player. The zen was what I had. I heard the reason iPod won out because they marketed toward school kids and gave some away. Then every other kid wanted what the other kids had. That’s genius if that’s true.
Jobs was a marketing genius. Stuck with some computers, donated them to schools. Kids learned how to use the apple, got out of school and had no idea how to run a pc so bought macs.
Vickie Vegas, I used to have a Zen creative player. I had it for a long time. It was great while it lasted. I finally gave it away to be recycled a few years ago.
Had no idea about this! Thank you for sharing 😊
that isn't necessarily a "format" war. I do believe both used MP3 format. All that would be is a brand war (apple vs pc), much like auto brands (gm vs ford vs chrysler vs all other manufacturing groups)
Alison Jordan I still have mine somewhere I saw it when I packed. It’s been two years since we moved so it’s probably packed in the garage somewhere. Yikes!
Within AC power the frequency was unsettled until as late as the late 1940’s.
SCE and LADWP operated at 50 Hz. Six of the units at Hoover Dam were installed capable (I.e. wound) such that they could operate at 50 or 60 Hz. Likewise some of the early pumping stations in the Phoenix area operated at 25 Hz. Interconnected Grid operation for reliability forced it to go to 60 Hz (in North America).
True. And American (including South America??) domestic power is 110v 60Hz, whereas most of the rest of the world uses 230v 50Hz. This used to matter a lot more before modern solid-state digital devices which just use an input power supply circuit (which can usually handle either voltage) to drop the input power to their chosen DC voltage.
Oh, and PAL vs NTSC TV formats.
GD vs. Vinyl LPs would have been very interesting since it looked like vinyl was completely dead. And now? Vinyl's in it for the long haul. CD's being squeezed out.
CDs were considered to have poorer quality audio, but they were much more convenient than vinyl.
@@writerpatrick CDs in 80's and most of the 90's were extremely tinny and compressed. Although the mp3 listening soul today would think otherwise. I bought vinyl as much as possible in the 90's. And I am glad to see them back as a viable option. I bought another turntable two years ago.
You missed 110V 60Hz vs 240V 50Hz electricity supply (not to mention plug and pin patterns) and Left-hand drive vs Right-hand drive cars
There's also 100V and 220V standards, which makes things more confusing.
The only place where there's a "war" over the first is in Japan. And it is a settled truce far more peaceful than on the Korean Peninsula. The second only come to clash with one another at the Hong Kong border crossing into China.
Ironically, my first introduction to the home pc was IBM where my school had a contract with them. As a field trip, we got to tour the headquarters and they supplied our school with 20 computers in my grade school. My personal first home computer was a Commadore 64, which I used as a gaming consol, which was extremely outdated because my friends were using Dreamcasts, Segas and Nintendo 64s. I also have a healthy collection of movies on VHS.
Then there was the corkscrew vs. double helix DNA format war of 5,000,000,000 BC. Critics of the Double Helix said the two helices were prone to getting tangled up together in early prototypes, and that the corkscrew format would be more reliable, but the double helix won because it could divide and the corkscrew could not.
Basement Berean they clearly failed at marketing
I blame topoisomerase for getting involved...
14:40 "using a transformer let AC transmit current at much faster speeds". So much bollocks, that I can't even begin to explain.
Electricity travels at the speed of light period .... However higher voltages from AC transformers travel longer distances with less power loss - can Simon follow that?
With 8-track cartridges, you couldn't skip forward to the next song. The tape had 8 parallel tracks and the tape head would read two tracks at a time (for stereo). When you pressed the channel button to select the next of the 4 channels (2 tracks per channel * 4 channels = 8 tracks) -- and you could only select the channels sequentially from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 1 -- the playback head would move up or down the width of the tape to align with the next pair of tracks. So typically changing channels would put you somewhere in the middle of a song. The tape was one long loop with the end of the tape spliced to the beginning with a metal foil. When the foil passed a sensor, the heads would automatically move to the next channel. The song order would often be jumbled compared to the LP so as to equally fill up each channel as much as possible, otherwise you'd have a lot of silence (well, tape hiss) before you got around to that splice. This channel switching is very different from the track switching feature of CDs. In fact CD track switching is more similar to LPs. With LPs you could easily and quickly skip to another track by lifting the tonearm and moving it forward or backward. With practice you could become accurate at placing the stylus exactly at the start of a desired track (except perhaps on those albums that didn't have clear banding). Some 8-track players added a fast-forward feature, but of course due to how the tape was looped it wasn't possible to "rewind" the tape.
AC is distributed at very high voltages because for the same power, the current will be less for higher voltage, and therefore there will be less power loss (which is proportional to the square of the current and the cable resistance). This is especially important as you distribute over long distances.
Oooh, I had an Atari 800 computer - loved it! *Pole Position*! I had that game, too!
There were also format wars in the earlier days of digital storage. The ZIP drive vs the DVD-RW. Zip drive never stood a chance.
The DVD has an ancestor the size of a record that was launched in the early 80s, but it never caught on.
Betamax tapes could record for more than 60 minutes. I know because we had Betamax when I was a kid. You could get around 3 1/2 hours out of them, dependent on which tap s you had.
what really decided the beta/vhs war was Disney finally picking vhs exclusively instead of using both as it had been doing
#wrong
The Betamax couldn't record for more than 60 minutes when it came out. It took 2 or 3 years for them to make a longer recording version, maybe even 5. By the time they did, they had the reputation of only having short recording tapes. Then JVC came out with the 4 hour tape, plus it was cheaper. Betamax never really recovered, even though they kept at it for a number of years.
Years from now we will find out which subscription video streaming service wins, or which personal voice assistant wins (Siri, Alexa, or Google). It will be interesting to see.
Christine Brown are you a nerd?
@@rgerber sometimes I am a nerd, yes. But I could say the same for anyone who is interested in this topic.
Before watching this video, DVDA meant something different to me...
You forgot about Tandy’s TRS-80, affectionately called the trash-80. The brand new computer lab at my high school (1980ish) was filled with 10 of those one piece jewels. 😝
Transmission of ac electric currents is not faster than dc current. They both "transmit" current at just under the speed of light.
Edison coined the term electrocution as a combination of electricity and execution.
I found out a while back that the Three Gorges Damn produces DC at super high voltage for it's transmission lines, it's crazy, it goes against everything I've learned, I think it goes extreme distances without substations, have you learned anything about it?
@@bigredc222 the trouble with DC is that the wires themselves act as resistors and dissipates the power. Three Gorges operates at a 500 kilovolt range which reduces the effect of the wire resistance to a manageable level. If Edison had the capability to generate voltages that high we would probably have a DC distribution system in the US.
@@Jeff121456 But why is 500 kv dc better than 500 kv a/c?
@@bigredc222 I don't think it is better. It may be that the infrastructure was cheaper.
@@bigredc222 HVDC only requires 2 lines vice 3 for HVAC and over very long distances HVDC has less loss than AC.
In 1976 I got a big bonus at work and paid 1000. for a monstrously sized Beta player. A year later a friend bought the same machine for 300. They weighed about 50 pounds.
I think even bigger then any of these, at least in the number of major players, was the war over early digital camera and camcorder storage formats. You had MMC vs SD vs CF vs xD vs Memory Stick vs XQD vs all the mini CD and hdd formats.
I remember the Commodore 64. Many great game on the computer.
And a format designed to teach BASIC programming. For my son's sake, I wish I still had mine...
@@SIUMoose They'd be worth a pretty penny now.
I still have one. It is in its original box.
Anyone remember the mid-90s large-storage disk wars? For a few years, Iomega and NEC were pushing Zip drives and disks that stored 100 MB per disk, which were hot because floppies could only store 1.44 MB. There were other large-storage disk drives too, most notably Micron's SuperDisk, which could store up to 120 MB and was backwards compatible with 1.44 MB floppies, but thanks to better marketing the Zip drive won out. Then came the USB storage drive era and all those disk drives went down the drain.
In 1985 I bought a Xerox computer. Yes, a computer. I may have been the only one to buy one.
SIgma 5 or Sigma 7?
8 tracks got chewed up all the time.
I miss the sense of ownership of any of those formats that aren't completely digital
Blue rays and DVDs are still in use.
I agree. I like hoarding digitally and having less physical stuff, and I regain most of the sense of ownership/permanence by making sure I have true copies of most files and can back them up myself instead of using the cloud too much ... But I still feel you on the way it's nice to have physical versions to actually handle and look at and curate.
I wish they mentioned fast food...yesterday I went to burger king and ordered a whooper. They forgot my cheese and all the condiments. This is why they will ALWAYS BE NUMBER 2!
The Burger King > Ronald McDonald Clown
Does W E N D Y 'S still exist?
BK isn't #2. Where I live I'm surprised they're still in business. And their recent "SJW" nonsense is likely losing them customers. Just Friday evening I drove past where there is a BK adjacent to a McD. The drive-thru for McD was full, BK's was empty and virtually no cars in the parking lot.
I wonder was the MP3 versus AAC audio compression format a little bit too technical for your list.
I miss my old Commadore PET. Complete with monochrome slime green monitor and magnetic tape drive.
What about the most recent format war: PewDiePie vs T Series?
F*** Thomas Edison.
Sorry. Somebody needed to say that.
And Nikola Tesla should have been given more emphasis than Westinghouse.
Yep.
TESLA
And Steve Jobs. And Bill Gates. And Walt Disney.
I was at Edison's Menlo Park lab, now located at Greenfield Village in Dearborn Michigan, in August 2018. I watched and listened to a very animated, passionate and talented museum presenter who was an obvious Edison fan, demonstrate and present the many "achievements" created at the Edison lab. I was part of a crowd of about 18 in the lab. When he asked the crowd the question if they really knew the story about how electricity was brought to the masses, I responded "Tesla and his Alternating Current did that!" Several in the little crowd to start vocally agreeing with me. When the increasingly frustrated presenter asked the visitors what other inventions they could name that Edison created? I responded, "Edison stole from Tesla, and invented patent trolling as a result!" I got the majority of the men, who easily made up 3/4 of in the crowd, suddenly giving me cheers and applause. Mic drop moment for me! Tesla made our current advanced technology possible. Tesla understood the fundamentals of radio waves, he was the inventor of radio, not Marconi. Tesla knew cell phone tech long before the first brick phones of the 80's. Edison never invented nor created a damned thing on his own. His brilliant staff, which briefly included Tesla, did all the experimenting, conceptualizing, innovating and creating, at which point Edison would simply file the patent on his employee's creations and take credit for himself, since he was the employer. Other than that, Edison was just another so-called 19th Century "robber-baron," a man of his Victorian times. Tesla was a man who was more than half a century ahead of his time, he is a man of the late 20th and the first half of the 21st Century, so far.
DCB vs. SCI Bus. Who won? Actually, they joined forces and created MIDI, Musical Instruments Digital Interface.
Young whippersnappers dont know a thing about 8track tape breaking, then taking the case apart and splicing the tape back together with the white repair tape.
I guess I'm not a young whippersnapper, though I was just a kid when 8-tracks were popular. I still remember hearing ads for music albums on TV say, "Available on LP, 8-track, or cassette."
@@dx1450 Pretty much all music released on 8-track and most cassette music was also available on record.
@@writerpatrick Yeah, in the late 70's though whenever K-tel would release a "best of" album or something, at the end of the commercial they'd always say that. I think the 8-track part started dropping off in the early 80's because even though they were still around, cassettes killed 8-tracks.
meh VHS worked the same i remember having to splice VHS back together with scotch tape all the damn time. never had that problem with my 8-tracks, nope the tape in those always got stretched to a point of unusability
Would have liked NTSC vs PAL 😀
"Never Twice Same Colour" vs "Picture Always Lousy".
They weren't competing formats, though. NTSC came first. The inventors of PAL had the benefit of seeing the problems with NTSC, and built on that. It's not like Europe had a format war.
This is a cool video topic nice work!
I had a Timex Sinclair, I got it for free when I bought living room furniture. It had a miniscule memory capacity and a problematic keyboard. I guess you could say it was worth what I paid for it.
That was what the Sinclair ZX80 was called in the US. I had the ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum (which was kind of an upgraded, colour version of the ZX's) Happy Days :-)
Con Edison in NYC shut down their DC network just some years ago. They still had a few customers.
Yes I'm a real nerd because I do love me a format war lol♥️
I agree wholeheartedly with your choices, but I was hoping to see Minidisk vs. Digital Audio Cassette. I remember a media push for DAC when I was in high school. Minidisk proved to be Superior and was used for field recording and other audio production work in the days before laptops and thumb drives became ubiquitous. Neither format ever caught on in the U.S. I'm not sure DAC ever caught on anywhere, while Minidisk remained popular in Japan well into the '00s.
There's a few others that haven't been included on this list. We tend to think of the battle between BluRay and HD DVD as the first videodisc format war, but it wasn't. In the early 80s Laserdisc hadn't really won over consumers, RCA launched a cheaper video disc system in it's CED Video Disc format. Basically movies on vinyl, although encased in a plastic caddy to protect the disc itself. It went head to head with Laserdisc, but back then consumers weren't really that interested in a non recordable format for movies as movies on VHS were good enough for our 21 inch CRT TVs, and of course we could record on blank VHS tapes too. CED died within a couple of years, while Laserdisc clung on even into the early 2000s positioning itself, once Pioneer took it over, as a format for serious movie collectors who wanted the highest quality for films at home. It stayed a niche format, but gained enough of a following for all of the big blockbuster films of the time to be released on the format. It was finally killed off by DVD, but not without a high definition version being launched in Japan to directly compete with DVD. A third videodisc format was also launched during that time, VED, although I don't think it made it out of Japan. Other notable format wars included the Minidisc vs DCC war of the early 90s, with minidisc winning but again not really becoming mainstream. Like Laserdisc it gained enough of a following in Europe and Japan to survive until fairly recently though, and still has an avid fan base with even new music being released on the format now and again.
In regards of the PC format war, even gaming consoles these days are glorified PCs, using AMD64 CPUs and AMD GPUs.
If by "glorified' you mean horribly worse in literally every way, then sure, they're glorified.
@@lordgarion514 Lol. I think he was just saying that at their heart, they're just PC architectures. Currently Jaguar cores for CPU (based off of an old mobile CPU), and GCN architecture, originally based off of the 7000 series AMD GPU's. Obviously the Pro and X have updated GPU's, but still the same CPU's, just clocked higher.
His PC examples weren't really formats. RISC vs. CISC is a possible format rivalry. Firewire vs. USB is another.
Microsoft Zune and Apple iPod.
9:18 the handclap!
“Oh no, Beta!”
Simon, another great video. Wondering how many retakes you had to do, with all the brand names and acronyms.
You mentioned the format war between wax cylinders and records, but during the establishment of record disks there was yet another format war. Some companies such as RCA cut their record groves using side-to-side vibration, but other record companies cut groves in an up-and-down motion, known as the "hill and dale" format. The two were NOT compatible. If you bought a phonograph designed for hill-and-dale, rather like Apple wanting their own pool of i-tunes, you could only play hill-and-dale records stamped by the same company.
The hill-and-dale cut proved to be inferior because the up and down motion of the needle caused records to wear out much faster than the competing side-to-side method. Hill-and-dale soon vanished as other companies pooled their patents and stamped "universal" records that could be played on any brand phonograph.
The Sony mini disc as an honorable mention
In case anyone is wondering, yes they make 8track to mp3 adaptors
With a simple audio adapter, you can plug an 8-track player into a computer.
3:20 Hah, neither SACD or DVD-A made much of an impact in the grand scheme of things. That was one format war where the outcome was one format just taking a bit longer to disappear from the market. :D
But SACD players not being cheap even today? Well, I'm not sure if it can be called an _SACD player_ in the scrictest sense of the word, but earlier this year I picked up a Samsung DVD-HD945, a DVD player with SACD playback, for a whopping 30€ at a local thrift store. I have _no_ idea if I'll ever even have SACDs in my record collection, but hey, it's a nifty feature to have just in case! :D A nice bonus on top of it being a slick looking DVD player with a nice selection of output options.
While Microsoft and Apple are both very successful in the computer Market, the fact remains that Microsoft has been consistently ahead in that field for decades so even though Apple's Macintosh is still around I think it's pretty clear that Microsoft Windows is actually the clear winner.
Digital camera storage formats was confusing in the early days. Up to 7 different modes at one time
There is one thing that you didn't mention. While Tesla and Westinghouse won the current war for homes and businesses, Edison didn't lose entirely either. How? DC is the electrical technology in Motor Vehicles, Boats, Planes, Electronics (you may plug your electronics into a electrical outlet, but they use a converter to convert 120/240VAC to 6-24VDC).
And LED lighting. Remember how people who wanted to hang onto incandescents used to complain about imagined flicker in CFLs that were switched at 20-40 kHz?
These videos are always well researched and presented. Where can i get a Simon Whistler t-shirt?
Actually, the standard L500 Betamax tapes ran to 120 minutes at BII speed and 210 minutes at BIII speed. Later, longer tapes could run as long as 5 hours. After Sony withdrew Beta from the consumer market, it went on successfully as a professional format for many years, even after VHS ceased to exist.
there was a format war for mechanical vs electronic TV in the 30s and then the "color standard" in the 50s
Good video. A few things you missed. First there has been a lot of technology since the original current wars. Today it is as efficient to transmit DC as AC and perhaps more so because of inductive and capacitive losses in the long power lines. Also AC and DC are equally deadly at the same voltage and current levels. Other format wars took place the CBS rotating disk color TV format vs the NTSC electronic color TV format, HD and digital radio formats, and numerous HDTV technologies and formats.
I'm surprised to learn that number 1 is still current
I have to say this, since no one else has; "boo". Just boo. lol
Another thing of note in the early computer wars: Apple made their schematics widely available so many clones appeared making Apple more popular. IBM kept theirs confidential. Later Apple designs were kept confidential but IBM clones became commonplace. IBM effectively lost the home computer war by giving away their OS, although they still produce business computers.
I experienced the Mandella Effect, concerning alternating and direct current.
How so?
Ac and DC travel at exactly the same speed. The difference is that DC tends to lose so much over a relatively short distance. It would have required a power plant every couple of miles.
One big format war you overlooked was the Ethernet vs Token Ring. Ethernet was invented by Bob Metcalf and championed by 3Com (among others). Token Ring was pushed by IBM. While both worked Ethernet was easier for most people to understand. It also ended up much less expensive. Today most computers have it built in.
OK, I have a more obscure format war. In the 60's when China was spreading to other countries, a new way of writing the Chinese language was needed for English speaking people. So two formats were competing: Pinyin and Wade-Giles. Pinyin won out and now the Wade-Giles system is forgotten; Pinyin remains the letter form of Mandarin Chinese when English speaking people learn to speak and write it.
#fascinating
LPs and 45s. Although not really a "war" per se, but they tried to make it one. The LP was invented in 1948 by Columbia Records and the 45 by RCA Victor. RCA figured they could out do everyone else simply because they had most of the world's greatest artists on their label. Columbia figured the world was ready for a record that could hold 30 minutes of music.
The public responded by not buying either one. A year later the companies decided to release the licensing rights to all record companies so all could benefit. (imagine that!)
As it turned out, there was no format war. The two formats did not compete with each other. Adults preferred the LP, the kids and jukebox companies preferred the 45.
By that time they knew the 78 format was getting obsolete. It had been around for 50 years and it was time to move on. The LP and 45 held their position for 35 years. It was a good run!
Excellent comment! It's worth adding that RCA's 7" product had a different size spindle hole to make it incompatible with everything except their own players. RCA also put a great deal of effort into designing automatic record changers that could very quickly change discs so that longer pieces of music could be listened to without significant breaks (the differenc in playing time being the major difference between the two formats). There is a (probably apocryphal) story that 45 rpm was selected mainly to be different from the 33rpm of Columbia's format and even that 45 was chosen because it is midway between 78 and 33 - sounds very unlikely! (The origins of the original 78rpm speed are not very well understood and some of the explanations for it not very credible eg 78rpm was the speed you got when joining commonly available motors and gears to rotate the turntable). A further ironic twist is that the current resurgence of vinyl sees many 'audiophile' albums being issued on 12" discs that play at 45rpm.
@@rolandbogush2594
👍 Thx for the cool comments. You have a keen interest in recording. There's a book, it's the definitive "bible" of the recording industry. "From Tinfoil to Stereo" (c. 1959) by Oliver Reed & Walter Welch. It's a 500+ page book of extremely fine print in double columns that has all that information. (not to be confused with Welch's "acoustic years" edition of the same title)
The 33 rpm was used for the LP because it had already been used successfully for radio transcriptions as far back as 1928. They just stuck with it.
The 45 came about mathematically. The longest 12" 78 ran for just over 5 minutes. RCA engineers figured the groove size (for maximum fidelity minimal distortion) and the 7" diameter to get the 5.5 minutes. The result was around 45 rpm. (from chapter 22, 'the war of the speeds' )
The 78 had it's own reasons but I'd have to reread half the book to get it. I know Edison disks were 80 rpm. I do remember the book mentioned an exact 78 rpm was almost impossible because of the limited technology. Voltage fluctuated, ac frequency wasn't perfect, etc. In fact, recording engineers often used spring or gravity powered motors for recording because it was easier to control.
That book was written in 1959. I consider that information to a very reliable source. Surviving documents, memos, and personnel (1st hand interviews) were still available at that time.
James S. Thank you! I shall look into sourcing that book - it sounds like it is THE authoritative source.
@@rolandbogush2594
Here's some information on the changing speed of the 45 players. The first year of RCA's 45 changer (model 9JY) was able to to do a complete cycle in one revolution. The problem with that is it puts a substantial load on the drive roller since the changer mech was driven from the rotating platter. I rebuilt one of those a few years ago and even with new roller it still barely functioned.
In 1951 the mech was changed so it took 2 revolutions to cycle. The new RP-190 was a substantial improvement in reliability and appearance. The RP-190 was actually manufactured by the Crescent Phonograph Co. of Chicago to RCA's specifications.
Another book you would like is "The Fabulous Victrola 45" by Phil Vourtsis. That just covers RCA's 45 player.
James S. Again, thank you!
Does anyone remember ancient video discs? Not the laser discs, but the one based on the LP...
The RCA CED format, it actually was released after the Laserdisc. It never achieved enough popularity to become a true format war (especially since at the times, video discs were a very niche market).
Never get tired of your channels....another winner here! 😎👍🏻👌🏻👏🏻
One of the biggest reasons why HD-DVD failed so hard is that unlike Blu-Ray on the PS3 you had to buy a separate external drive for the XBOX 360 at the cost of an extra $120 USD.
What about the console wars?
PC masterrace
CD vs MP3/4 would be interesting
Em Pee FOUR?!?!?!?!?!
Windows has 90% of the desktop market, I think that’s a very clear win
from 2013 to 2016 i still think that apple devices is great for its price... in 2019 i had no reason to like apple devices anymore. but apple is formidable as a company... they went ahead battling Google android with the left hand and Microsoft Windows on the right hand
I used to think Apple products were cool, but then they started to get rid of ports and such...not cool
Windows was rubbish compared to IBM's OS/2, but Windows defeated OS/2 because you had to buy and install OS/2 yourself. This was truly a case of the worst product winning a format war.
People don't primarily buy desktops anymore. They use phones and tablets. So overall loss for desktops in general.
it's sad...mobile technology like that still has a long ways to go before it catches up with that of our desktops and laptops, but it's clear that the days of the desktop and laptop are limited
No mention of LaserDisc?
I recall video rental stores, in the early '80s, briefly carrying LaserDisc before switching to VHS.
0:17
A shame about LaserDiscs, I still fondly remember watching the original Star Wars trilogy on that format, it was glorious.
Mine had both
LaserDisc kind of stayed around as a niche videophile format and had a second burst of popularity in the early 90s just before DVDs became a thing.
How about LOTUS 123 VS Excel?
Phred Phish you forgot Quattro Pro
Beta was capeable of 4 hour play, with an LP (long play) setting, when VHS was still running at 2 hours. VHS did eventually incorporate the same type of setting, but Beta remained the superior system.
Great video. I thought you were going to roll into the USB Firewire war when talking about peripherals.
I used to sell blank beta tapes to the Neilson ratings guys in the late 90's at RadioShack... They used them because the capacity is bigger than vhs
AC and DC I would call a tie, yes power is pretty much all transmitted in AC but most electronics actually use DC power.
No, DC voltage cannot be changed, and that kills it for grid use. Transmitting power over wires depends on the ability to move the voltage/current ratio up and down. Yes, devices use DC, but that involves using a transformer before converting it to DC.
@@puncheex2 I never specified grid use, I specified use for personal electronics and last time I checked your PC doesn't use AC power, it's rectified to DC before actually going to your components. You're not getting AC power off a SATA power cable.
*DC voltage cannot be changed, and that kills it for grid use.*
This is demonstrably false. How do you think that you have multiple power rails in electronics? How do you think USB car chargers work? USB runs at 5v but that car socket puts out 12v so if your claim is true then USB car chargers should be blowing up any phone plugged into it as it's overvolting it by more than 2x. DC to DC converters can be made for hobbyist electronic projects for a few dollars with off the shelf components. Hell how do you think Qualcomm Quickcharge works? It modifies the voltage pretty much on the fly. Yes, it's harder to change DC voltage but not impossible, and DC power is already seeing limited and expanding grid use today.
Commodore was my first computer first I had the VIC 20, then the 64 and the last one I had was the 128. First I started with tape for a storage device then eventually a floppy drive.
String Bass players: French bow vs. German bow. LOL.
Guy Pidkameny in Chinese string instruments we have the same thing. Beijing bow vs Shanghai bow lol
Bronze versus steel? Thatch versus peat?
You forgot CompactFlash vs SD vs MemoryStick vs XD.
Paul Kienitz - And Smart Media!
#11 Homo Sapiens vs. Neanderthal
lmao
The neanderthal was clearly outdated when it was released and no room for improvement
Grunnnttttttttttt! Ugh!
12:45 Nope, printers could be exchanged between different computers. The only question of compatibility was whether you were using a RS232 serial interface or a centronics parallel interface.
Great video. My father-in-law still insists to this day that BetaMax should have won.
Beta had fewer video artifacts, and it's hi-fi sound would never "Untrack" as VHS did. Beta was techincally superior, but people wanted cheap stuff that preformed worse.
You forgot to mention that DC is still used for most vehicle electronics and nearly all computers and mobile devices. That big “brick” charger for your laptop/mobile is simple converting AC to DC.
Nice subject! Wish I could give you 👍👍👌!
Actually SACD still sells very well...and most Sony BluRay players can play them.
It's a niche audiophile thing but yeah, they're still around along with Blu-Ray Audio (DVD-A's spiritual successor). I own several of both format and (you guessed it) a nice Sony Blu-Ray player.