Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

From: Mia Magnusson <mia_at_plea.se>
Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2019 21:00:23 +0100
Message-ID: <20190110210023.00002d08@plea.se>
Den Wed, 9 Jan 2019 11:13:02 +0100 skrev Gerrit Heitsch
<gerrit@laosinh.s.bawue.de>:
> On 1/8/19 10:41 PM, smf wrote:
> > 
> > VHS didn't win because of it's technical superiority either.
> 
> VHS won over Beta or Video2000 for two reasons: JVC licensed the 
> technology to anyone who asked and the picture and audio quality was 
> 'good enough'.

Also VHS were able to store more on each cassette, 3hr from the start
and later IIRC BASF even did 5hr tapes (!).

Video 2000 came a few years too late. It took Philips (and their
partner in crime Grundig) too long to wake up and realize that their
old VCR/VCR LP/SVR format were going to die due to competition from
VHS. (It's kind of cool that Philips sold their VCR machines and
cassettes back in 1972 and except for a higher price and only 1hr per
cassette it had all the features of the first VHS machines almost half
a decade later. One thing Philips and Grundig did to dig their own
grave was that their long play (2hr) and super long play (4hr, Grundig
only, called SVR) weren't even able to play back the older formats, so
it would had been impossible for a movie rental business back then, as
each movie would have had to be stocked in three different formats, of
which one format would had required two cassettes for each movie.

> When I now dig out my old VHS and pop in an old tape, I wonder how I 
> tolerated VHS back then, especially the distortions when doing fast 
> forward. But it was either that or no recording at all, so you put up 
> with it.

I'd say that the problems with VHS is the slow speed of fast forward /
rewind, the lack of any automatic way of organizing your library and
having to physically move the tapes between the VCR and your
library/shelf.

A rather low picture quality sure made VHS to totally die as soon as it
was reasonable to store video on recordable DVD discs and/or hard
disks. If the picture quality would had been great, VHS might had lived
on like vinyl records do. (An oddball here is audio cassettes, which
kind of has survived (in low volumes) but I'd say that the sound
quality of a reasonable audio cassette is more near the best you can
hear than the picture quality of a VHS tape compared to what your eyes
can see. Also listening to music is a different thing than watching TV
series and movies. Also music from back in the days seems to hold up
far better than movies and especially TV series from back in the days -
IMHO most fiction TV series and movies from back in the days are pure
crap).

> Windows 3.x was in that 'good enough' category as well, at least for 
> people who came from DOS. If you already knew AmigaOS or MacOS, you 
> usually thought differently. :)

Hot take: Windows 3.x had memory protection and some kind of resource
tracking. (Although a bunch of vulnerable stuff weren't protected, it
at least did a reasonable job of catching software bugs where pointers
got totally screwed up).

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Received on 2019-01-10 21:04:31

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