Did you love Laserdisc? Were you bonkers over Betamax? Do you cry yourself to sleep because BeOS never hit the big time? Fret no more -- superdork Captain Tech is here to travel back in time and save the format losers that should have triumphed.
2. Betamax
3. Laserdisc
4. 8-track
5. High-definition audio
7. BeOS
8. DTS
9. Atari ST
10. What life would be like
The quest begins
All images courtesy of Mia Underwood
We hate format wars. Not because we're afraid of good old-fashioned tech fisticuffs, but because they're often completely unjust. So often, the format that wins isn't technically better than the competition, just cheaper or better marketed. (And no, we're not just sore because we were Betamax owners.)
It's happened so many times over the years that we had to make a list of the technologies that got knocked out of the fight for survival, but really shouldn't have. We've laid out the reasons their demise was unfair along with the causes over the next nine pages.
We've also allowed ourselves to dream. What if we could go back in time and change the way it happened? And as if by magic, our prayers were answered. The sky darkened and from the clouds appeared a shadowy figure resplendent in a tight Lycra outfit and cape. In a booming voice he said, "Don't worry technology lovers, I'm Captain Tech, and it's my job to put right what once went wrong. Technologically speaking, anyway."
And with that Captain Tech vanished into some sort of quantum vortex, and journeyed back through time to assist ailing technology and save the gadgets that should have made it...
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canberra_photographer
30/12/2007 01:16 AM
Doesn't wear out over time? Laserdisc was netoriuous for so called "laser rot" and the size and materials used meant that discs were easily scratched. I'll take VHS anyday, though I would have prefered beta!
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canberra_photographer
30/12/2007 01:32 AM
DTS a failure, every news Special Edition DVD has DTS from the major studios. They remastered the entire James Bond series into DTS and proudly make it a selling point. DTS is a success. MiniDisc over iPod, the iPod can hold uncompressed WAV audio, MP3, AAC. MD hold... ATRAC... and... well nothing else, just heavily compressed ATRAC. DTS is the only things in this list deserving of being saved. Even high def audio isn't. The world is moving towards digital content delivery through the internet.
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abuska
30/12/2007 07:07 PM
absolutely brilliant article guys.. thankyou
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Peterk
04/01/2008 10:59 AM
Our friend from the ACT is not aware of Hi-MD introduced in 2003/4. 1 gb minidiscs that could record many hours of music (highly compressed) and be used for jpeg, word and other comptuer files. ATRAC still sounds far superior to MP3
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canberra_photographer
11/01/2008 09:56 AM
An iPod is way better than those mini disc players because u would have to carry those mini-discs everywhere, and the iPod stores everything on its hard disk.
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two-ears-good,four-ears-better
29/05/2008 06:33 PM
Comparing iPod with Mini-disc is not really the point. The two are different products for different purposes. Can you do high-quality field recordings with an iPod? I doubt it. OTOH for the convenience of carrying around a great deal of reasonable quality music just to listen to, there are many MP3 hard-disc players around (not *just* iPod, let's remember!) which offer a more compact solution than Mini-disc. There are many other issues like battery life, battery replacement, add-ons, etc, etc. Neither technology wins on all points.
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