TECH BONEYARD: Dead Hardware and Media

[Sir Patrick Crocodile]

http://www.gearfuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/walkman.gif
Who cares about ipods?

[Sir Patrick Crocodile]

Better mourn, Croc. They announced just this week (http://www.betanews.com/article/Sony-stopping-sales-of-iconic-Walkman-tape-player-in-Japan/1288031358) that they are winding 'em up.Dayum... the Walkman was without a doubt the tape player of back then. Almost everybody would go out and buy one. And at least it didn't look like a five dollar toy from a McDonald's happy meal, which is exactly what I thought the iPod was when I first saw it in 2004 on the television.

[Atrax Robustus]

Heh heh.

The first cassettes I used, I was storing COBOL, FORTRAN and BASIC programs.

Didn't think they'd ever catch on for general recording purposes. :o

How old are you Croc? I suspected that you would have been a DiscMan toddler!

[Sir Patrick Crocodile]

I'm no DiscMan fellow mate. The new DiscMan came in and I was also thinking the same thing I was thinking about the ipods. They just don't have the same "zing" as the Walkman did. :)

I was one who was thinking that cassette tapes would never be phased out and BOOF! we now have MP3s galore! :D

[Atrax Robustus]

Well there ya go!

It must be the water and repetitive mud baths - you hold your age very well!

[Sir Patrick Crocodile]

Black: are the tapes in those like audio tapes? With the tabs that you can break off to write-protect them and stuff?

[robertkd]

Yep tis so audio cassettes,

[Atrax Robustus]

I almost had kittens . . . !

At first look I thought that was a Dvorak keyboard!

Time for bed methinks . . .

[Sir Patrick Crocodile]

Tapes are still ridiculously common in India and are sold all over the place.

In fact, I even have old VCDs from there, albeit in a quality that is probably a little worse than its VHS and Betamax counterparts.

The VCDs were bought less than 4-5 years ago, and you can still buy old VHS tapes of various films (including some English serials) from there.

I wonder if I still have those old Quran/Islamic tapes... if I find them I'll summon that neodymium magnet I got from Jaycar (not long ago) upon them.

[Atrax Robustus]

Ahhh Beta! Another of my far reaching technical predictions.

"No one would be stupid enough to buy VHS over Beta - don't buy one of those VHS things - they'll never catch on." :(

[robertkd]

Ahhh Beta! Another of my far reaching technical predictions.

"No one would be stupid enough to buy VHS over Beta - don't buy one of those VHS things - they'll never catch on." :(

Oh another quadrennium Beta was better but VHS was cheap so which domestic format won? Yep cheap and cheerful. :eek:

[Logic please]

Ahhh Beta! Another of my far reaching technical predictions.

"No one would be stupid enough to buy VHS over Beta - don't buy one of those VHS things - they'll never catch on." :(

Oh another quadrennium Beta was better but VHS was cheap so which domestic format won? Yep cheap and cheerful. :eek:

Agree with these... I worked in a video library before, during and after the death of Beta... us staff could not understand how the inferior format won the war, from any (purely) technical perspective... :eek:

For some of the reasons why Beta lost the war: LINK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war)

Beta sales dwindled away and VHS emerged as the winner of the format war. The video format war is now a highly scrutinized event in business and marketing history, leading to a plethora of market investigations into why Betamax failed. Sony seemed to have misjudged the home video market. JVC quickly licensed its VHS technology and just about every major consumer electronics company of the era (JVC, Panasonic, RCA, Magnavox, Quasar, Zenith, et al.) had their own brand of VCR and at a significantly lower retail price, due in part to high competition among the brands, than the Betamax. Sony believed that the 1-hour length of their current Umatic format would be sufficient for Betamax too. However... [f]or home usage, one hour would not be enough to record an evening of primetime programming, or Monday Night Football. Therefore, consumers naturally flocked to the 4-hour "Long Play" VCRs offered by RCA and Matsushita in 1976.
Further driving the VHS format was its inherent 2 hour playback time (SP speed) - a much better fit for Hollywood movies than Betamax's 1-hour limitation. This event spawned the huge video rental business that flourished in the 1970s and 80s. Being able to watch Hollywood movies at home was a major innovation that transformed consumer habits and allowed people to see older "classic" films that had been buried in the vaults for years.
What Sony did not take into account was what the consumers wanted. While consumers did perceive Sony and the Betamax to be superior and preferred to purchase a Betamax, due to brilliant marketing by Sony, consumers wanted an affordable VCR (a VHS often cost hundreds of dollars less than a Betamax), but Sony believed that having better quality recordings was the key to success, and that consumers would be willing to pay the higher retail price for it, whereas it soon became clear that consumer desire was focused more intently on recording time, lower retail price, compatibility with other machines for sharing (as VHS was becoming the format in the majority of homes), brand loyalty to other than Sony, and compatibility for easy transfer of information.[6] (http://www.atheistfoundation.org.au/forums/#cite_note-5) In addition, Sony, being the first producer to offer their technology, also thought it would establish Betamax as the leading format. This kind of lock-in and path dependence (http://www.atheistfoundation.org.au/wiki/Path_dependence) failed for Sony, but succeeded brilliantly for JVC. For thirty years JVC dominated the home market with their VHS, Super VHS, and VHS-Compact (http://www.atheistfoundation.org.au/wiki/VHS-C) formats and collected billions in royalty payments.[7] (http://www.atheistfoundation.org.au/forums/#cite_note-6)


</thread derail> ;):D

[Sir Patrick Crocodile]

I should have said in my previous post I was mentioning the *new* discman which came out in 2000 - I had no idea it existed before that... dayum! :D

Maybe it wasn't very popular where I lived until then. :p

[robertkd]

Agree with these... I worked in a video library before, during and after the death of Beta... us staff could not understand how the inferior format won the war, from any (purely) technical perspective... :eek:

For some of the reasons why Beta lost the war: LINK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war)



</thread derail> ;):D

Yes and now look at what the free to air serve up as video bit rate starved compressed to the point of bursting freling mpeg :eek:

Sure mpeg can be good but please give it decent bit rates,...stop macro blocking and bit rate starvation artefacts, pffft VHS again.

[Xeno]

I've still got two cassette-loaded computers in use, and a reasonable supply of tapes.For speed and reliability I avoided using cassette tapes, waiting until I could get a diskette based machine. The disks held 32KB :eek:, which was fine because it matched total RAM.

[Xeno]

It gets worse.

Not the Technics turntable too? (http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/10/end-of-an-era-panasonic-kills-off-technics-turntables/#more-424829)

You can still buy the best from Rega (http://www.rega.co.uk/index2.htm).

[Sir Patrick Crocodile]

Ah... old CRT monitor + 10Amps or so of current through the degaussing coils at switch on = nicely erased cassettes sitting on top :)Never forget about what happened if the cassettes were sitting on top of unshielded subwoofers in wooden enclosures. :)

[cyclist]

Agree with these... I worked in a video library before, during and after the death of Beta... us staff could not understand how the inferior format won the war, from any (purely) technical perspective... :eek:

For some of the reasons why Beta lost the war: LINK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war)



</thread derail> ;):D

One of the other reasons why Beta lost the war was because of the porn industry. They wanted a cheap distribution model, and subsequently they went VHS.

This was pretty much the same reason why DVDHD lost to BluRay, the porn industry choose BluRay, and that spelled the end to DVDHD.

The last I have heard, is that the porn industry want to get onto HTML 5 and get rid of flash.

James

[Sir Patrick Crocodile]

I remember having one of those VCRs with a remote control connected to it with a very long cord. It was one of the old JVC models. :)
Now about Sony; they have always been dickheads regarding licensing: even the new products (PSP etc) have these DRM issues and crap, and they insist on using ATRAC for some reason. :mad:

[loubert]

I still collect vinyl.....lol


hang on, I thought the porn industry where backing HDDVD originally? ermm I'm probably wrong though.

[Sir Patrick Crocodile]

Black: I say what are the specs of that computer?