REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Betamax and Airliners

POSTED BY: ANTHONYT
UPDATED: Saturday, April 29, 2006 05:03
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Thursday, April 27, 2006 4:21 PM

ANTHONYT

Freedom is Important because People are Important


Hi all,

I recently read another thread where two things stuck out as being comment worthy. These two things were not related to the thread topic, really, so I'm addressing them here.

1) "And it IS correct, no one could have expected the use of airliners as weapons."

My response: There is a reason why, when September 11th occurred, that the press was calling it 'something out of Tom Clancy.' Forget top-secret classified security reports. Tom Clancy had a book out where the prez was smeared when a jetliner crashed into a government building. That's how Jack Ryan became president. So, yeah, someone could have expected it, and wrote a book about it. The problem is either no-one took it seriously, or no-one felt they could do anything about it without creating a ruckus. (How many people would put up with increased security and delays at airports if there was no precipitating event to demonstrate why it was necessary?)

2) "Beta was superior, but (like Nader) had poor backing, and lost."

My comment: Beta was a superior format, but the company that owned it was a nitwit. They made Betamax more expensive than VHS, and gave it (initially) a smaller capacity cassette. If these mistakes had not been made, we'd have been using beta tapes right through until DVD's became popular. It is interesting to note, however, that in professional industries, Betamax has been (and still is some places) used because of its superiority. Because cost doesn't matter as much when quality is on the line, as it is in professional settings.

This same thing happened with Apple and Applesoft vs. IBM and Microsoft, by the way. Apple chose to provide less product for more money. Apple had a superior operating system and hardware, but priced it through the moon and provided less than their competitors. When I was young, my father had to choose between a IIGS box with 256k memory for 640 bucks, or a PC clone box with 640k memory, keyboard, monitor, and disk drives for 640 bucks. We had owned an Apple II, II+, and IIE, but he made the switch because of a cost to benefit analysis. Apple priced themselves into oblivion, and had an architecture that they refused to share. Now we see Macs used mostly by professionals in audio/video fields. Just like Beta is/was used mostly by professionals. Professionals were the few people who needed the difference in quality, and were willing to pay for it.

Ultimately, you give people something they can use, give it to them cheap, and give them a lot of it. That's how you win a format war.

Two cents on two topics.

--Anthony

"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner

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Thursday, April 27, 2006 4:43 PM

GEEZER

Keep the Shiny side up


Quote:

Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Hi all,

I recently read another thread where two things stuck out as being comment worthy. These two things were not related to the thread topic, really, so I'm addressing them here.

1) "And it IS correct, no one could have expected the use of airliners as weapons."

My response: There is a reason why, when September 11th occurred, that the press was calling it 'something out of Tom Clancy.' Forget top-secret classified security reports. Tom Clancy had a book out where the prez was smeared when a jetliner crashed into a government building. That's how Jack Ryan became president. So, yeah, someone could have expected it, and wrote a book about it. The problem is either no-one took it seriously, or no-one felt they could do anything about it without creating a ruckus. (How many people would put up with increased security and delays at airports if there was no precipitating event to demonstrate why it was necessary?)



Or it could have been a blimp (Black Sunday) or a soda machine (Sum of All Fears)(or snack machine or something similar, I can't recall.) There's just too many off-the-wall posibilities proposed in fiction or in think-tanks to consider them all at the top of the list. There just aren't the resources to cover them all. And, unfortunately, trying to prioritize them all sometimes misses the wild-card in the deck. It would be nice if we could cover every eventuality, but it's just not possible.

"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Friday, April 28, 2006 12:02 PM

CITIZEN


Quote:

Originally posted by AnthonyT:
This same thing happened with Apple and Applesoft vs. IBM and Microsoft, by the way. Apple chose to provide less product for more money. Apple had a superior operating system and hardware, but priced it through the moon and provided less than their competitors. When I was young, my father had to choose between a IIGS box with 256k memory for 640 bucks, or a PC clone box with 640k memory, keyboard, monitor, and disk drives for 640 bucks. We had owned an Apple II, II+, and IIE, but he made the switch because of a cost to benefit analysis. Apple priced themselves into oblivion, and had an architecture that they refused to share. Now we see Macs used mostly by professionals in audio/video fields. Just like Beta is/was used mostly by professionals. Professionals were the few people who needed the difference in quality, and were willing to pay for it.

Ultimately, you give people something they can use, give it to them cheap, and give them a lot of it. That's how you win a format war.


Actually the major thing was Apples closed software/hardware architecture. It was in fact IBM's lack of vision that proved the deciding factor.

IBM believed there was nothing in this silly new Personal Computer market, meaning they let the patent on the IBM x86 PC slip after just one year.

IBM beleived that the computer market would be increasingly centralised with ever more powerful central units, rather than as is now the case a very distributed enviroment. In their centralised vision the PC simply had no place.

Net result was that there was, essentially, a ready made de-facto proven and working standard because anyone could develop hardware and software for the IBM PC. Obviously that gives more choice and the inevitable competition drove prices for the IBM PC down.



More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
And as you know, these are open forums, you're able to come and listen to what I have to say.

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Friday, April 28, 2006 12:28 PM

FLETCH2


It's actually a little more complicated than that. The group at IBM that was working on the PC was a peripheral products group, it was seen as kind of an enhanced peripheral device for hooking to a mainframe. To get it to market quick and cheap they made two critical decisions.

1) They let Microsoft market DOS to 3rd parties rather than pay extra for an exclusive deal.

2) They based aspects of the design on Intel provided reference documents for the 8088 chip, this had the side effect of making it harder to patent the hardware.

Now because the hardware was so generic IBM felt ok about producing a comprehensive hardware reference manual for the machine complete with circuit diagrams and ROM code listings. Apple had done this themselves with the Apple II in order to get more developers working on their machine. Apple had copyrighted the ROM code for the Apple II and had successfully seen off a number of Apple clones that had copied their ROM code. IBM copyrighted their ROM BIOS and believed that alone would make it impossible to copy the PC. Unfortunately they didn't really understand the microprocessor marketplace. The Apple ROMS contained the OS, boot code, basic and glue routines nescessary to make an apple clone boot. The ROM and the hardware were very tightly integrated and the job of writing a "work alike" Apple Rom was therefore none trivial.

Because IBM based the hardware on a generic Intel spec sheet IBM ROM code tended to be more structured and orthodox. In addition because DOS ran from floppy and not from ROM the IBM ROMs really only contained low level system calls. It was far easier to write a legal IBM BIOS clone than it was to do the same for Apple.

The PC was therefore a HW design that IBM had put into the public domain and was in any case based on freely available Intel documents, an OS that Microsoft was allowed to sell to anyone and the tiny ROM BIOS code that was the only thing IBM controlled. A company called Pheonix wrote a clean bios clone that allowed anyone to make a PC without having to pay IBM a cent.

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Friday, April 28, 2006 12:32 PM

OLDENGLANDDRY


Did anyone else see the original pilot episode of "The Lone Gunmen" ?
Where an Airliner is hijacked by government agents and flown at the world trade centre to give just cause for a war?

I think the idea of airliners as weapons is not totaly unexpected or original.

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Friday, April 28, 2006 1:16 PM

CITIZEN


And the reason IBM did alot of that was because their centralised computing model had no room for the PC, so they didn't care about it.



More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
And as you know, these are open forums, you're able to come and listen to what I have to say.

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Saturday, April 29, 2006 5:03 AM

IMNOTHERE


Quick history lesson:

When the IBM PC came out in 1981, the Apple II architecture was showing its age. The Apple III had gone pearshaped (at great expense) and their "killer app" (the first spreadsheet - VisiCalc) was available on other platforms. People joke about the 640K memory limit on the IBM - the Apple II could only directly address 64K!

The IIGS didnt come out until 1986 and, whetever its merits, was (probably) only really intended for the education market, where the Apple II had maintained a niche. By then, Begun, the Clone Wars had, and it was nigh-on impossible for a proprietary system to compete on price with a PC clone assembled from commodity parts).

The Mac was adopted by designers largely because it introduced a new "killer app" - Desktop Publishing - that, for a long time, PCs simply couldn't do.

Before the IBM PC there was a wealth of competing personal computer platforms: Apple, Commodore PET, Tandy/Radio Shack, Atari, ACT/Sirius/Apricot, Sinclair/Timex, Acorn (in the UK) not to mention the numerous broadly compatible systems based on the CP/M operating system. Apple is pretty much the last man standing - so they must have done something right.



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