History repeats unless we pay attention: Betamax vs VHS, Commodore Amiga, is Cryptocurrency next
I've only paid much attention to crypto currency with my peripheral vision. I've been aware of it for some time and have dabbled briefly with mining Bitcoin (twice) with underwhelming results. Steemit and the steem blockchain changed that. I've been using it since July and along with that comes an increasing awareness of things in the crypto currency scene. I am not even close to an expert, and in fact I'd still consider myself very much a novice. Even with that said I am exposed to a lot of news about it. I am finding that historical occurrences keep returning to my mind when I consider crypto currency.
I happened to be around when Betamax and VHS which were different standards of VCR technology (Video Cassette Recorder) which spawned all the Blockbusters, and movie rentals. For the first time you could rent movies and watch them at home. You could buy movies and watch them as much as you wanted. You could record television shows and rewatch them. You could even copy the movies to blank cassettes, and eventually use cameras to record home movies on them.
However, what a lot of people these days may not be aware of is that Betamax was actually superior technology to VHS. It was higher quality and better across the board. The real reason it did not win this war was because, it was proprietary and closed. VHS was opened so any manufacturers that wanted to could jump into building devices and media for it. The end result is that Betamax lost market share and was replaced by a lesser but open technology.
This isn't the only time I have seen this. I was a proud and fanatical owner of a Commodore Amiga computer which at the time was at least 5 years ahead of any IBM Compatible (term used at the time), or Apple computers available. It was likely the best computer available on the market for some time. Commodore made it's wealth off of the Commodore 64 which wasn't as ahead but was at a price point to where it became one of the most purchased computers out there. It turns out their management and board of directors were rather stupid. They would have board meetings in the Bahamas and they would do almost no advertising. As a Commodore owner you had to jump through hoops to get software for your machine when compared to the amount available on other platforms. Eventually, Commodore would go bankrupt though they had a computer that was AT LEAST 5 years ahead of the competition technologically speaking.
Now let's look at IBM Compatibles (these days called PCs, though Commodore and Macs are technically PCs too) and Apple Macintosh series computers. Apple gave a ton of free computers to schools, and media outlets (newspapers, magazines, etc). They did this when they had better publishing software working on the machines. This caused a lot of exposure for Macintosh and it kind of indoctrinated a group of people into the Apple way of doing things. It was proprietary. The PC market was exploding because, like VHS anyone could jump into the manufacture and development of devices and machines based upon its technology. It was a free market place. PCs dominated the market by a large margin and they still maintain this dominance today. Mainly due to not being closed/proprietary.
After PCs had already established a big foothold on the market Apple opened the Mac line up to not be as proprietary for awhile. During this period the best and most powerful Macintosh computer you could get actually was not made by Apple. When Apple made their designs free market a company called PowerMac was building better machines than them. They eventually closed it and made it proprietary again and thus, PowerMac no longer exists.
What about crypto currency?
Right now there are vast amounts of crypto currency. You'll hear the term alt-coins, and shit coins fairly frequently bantered about. Bitcoin is the first and thus dominates. The current goal is to see who can become second place and maybe some day replace bitcoin. There are a number vying for this position.
Ethereum - with its contracts as the main driving thing. Yet also fragmented to Ethereum and Ethereum Classic after the DAO incident. This fragmentation makes the ETH/ETC waters a little unclear at times.
Dash - has a lot of buzz. It is a smart design in attempting to make it very easy for the average person to use. Though in reality its biggest win seems to be in marketing, advertisement, and already kind of forming its own celebrity advocates for it.
Steem - based on graphene Steem is capable of doing what these currencies do, and then some. It is also technologically faster, scales far better, etc. This is true at this moment, but could change. Steemit is also a bonus for this.
Yet what I am seeing is that Steem reminds me a bit of the Betamax and Commodore Amiga situations and due to proprietary licensing and/or failure to properly market it could easily lose out to lesser crypto currencies.
The tech is there. We need to learn from history and try not to repeat the mistakes of the past. We need to show that what those currencies can do, we can do better. If there are issues that make it unattractive in the license then that verbage needs to change to make it so that is not the case.
I was an Amiga fanboy. I had my fanatic period of talking about how great my machine was, and proving it. Yet, ultimately my machine of choice died and lost anyway.
I have been platform agnostic since then though I've primarily been on Windows, and some Linux. I have dabbled with a little Mac OSX here and there.
I find that I have a bit of that fanboy mentality occurring with Steem and Steemit and I don't want to see it go the way of the Betamax, and Amiga. Yet it has a very similar feeling and that could easily happen. Right now the movement in DASH is making me think back to VHS and to IBM Compatibles. This may be a false comparison, but that is the impressions I am getting at the moment.
So what can we do to change this? The best technology often loses to superior marketing, and openness.
Steem On!
Atari also bite the dust despite that wonderful Atari ST, model with GEM OS and MIDI support…
As far as cryptocurrencies – Antonopulous said an interesting thing: they all are going to have to prove themselves out in the wild. If they bust, that will be deserved, and we will not have any sentimental memories to them.
Yeah Atari ST and the Amiga actually shared similar technology. They were similar in a lot of ways though the Amiga added a thing or two that the Atari didn't have.
Atari ST though was superior to the IBM Compatible, and Macs of the time.
The Amiga had 4096 Colors and the Atari was either 512 or 1024.
Yes, Amiga had 4096 in Hold an Modify(aka HAM) interlaced mode. It made for amazing images. It didn't work very well for anything that needed to actually move, but for static images it was unprecedented. There also turns out to be quite a few useful cases for just having a static image.
I used it a lot when coding fractals. It was great for PORN as you mentioned elsewhere in relation to Betamax. Best looking computer PORN ever at that time. We downloaded quite a bit of that of the internet before WWW existed. :) (FTP porn)
I didn't remember the specifics on Atari ST's graphics here is what wiki said:
Atari ST was similar to an Amiga in a lot of ways, and my friends and I that had Amigas actually felt some kinship with Atari owners though I only ever met a few. The most common scene that BOTH interacted pretty heavily in was the MOD/Music scene.
You inspired me for completeness sake to look up some specifics.
For anyone reading this that wants to deep dive into Atari ST and Amiga. Here is a great wordpress blog.
A history of the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga
I wanted to share that quote from his blog as there is a correction to that. It died and was resurrected for awhile. I don't know how it is doing now, and it may indeed be dead. However, I actually worked with Bioware on the final premium module for Neverwinter Nights 1 (The Wyvern Crown of Cormyr) and I wrote a number of the scripts in the final 1.69 patch for NWN, open it up in the toolset and you'll find my name on all the horse scripts and a few other things. However, my pedigree is only mentioned for purpose of stating how I can know what I will now relate. Atari was the publisher for the Neverwinter Nights game. On our module (I was actually part of the DLA / RoXiDy team) at the time would get QAed by us, then by Bioware, then by Atari, and finally Wizards of The Coast (aka WOTC who held the licenses for D&D) would get a final say. Things that were awesome could make it all the way to WOTC only to be cut. One of the drawbacks of basing your game on Intellectual Property controlled by someone else. Anyway, Atari was alive and well at that time and this was in the mid to late 2000s. I had to interact with them personally.
GEM on the PC was also better than Windows at the time.
You're leaving out a very important part. The Reason VHS killed Betamax was because Sony would not allow Porn on Betamax and VHS did and that killed Betamax in consumer market.
Sony almost did it againt with Bluray and HD DVD allowed Porn. Then someone with a Brain at Sony said let's not repeat that mistake and they allowed porn on Bluray and that with having a massive Bluray user base via the PS3 killed off HDDVD because they could game and watch porn on the same device.
We have a similar situation on Steemit. We have the puritan crowd that flags anything that show even a bikini or thong and down votes all adult content.
Not realizing they are killing Steemit because even content FB openly allows the attack and flag and downvote. They want everyting marked NSFW and even when no nudity (by the standrds of FB and Instagram) it is still flagged.
When a person does post adult or nude content and mark it NSFW they still attack and flag it.
In their ignorance they don't realize the IG would not have been work $1 Billion Dollars without the audience of millions that came there to see half naked girls in thongs or implied nudes. Or that FB who spends millions on research allowed implied nudes and thongs, bikini pics because it would kill the site if they didn't and I read somewhere the are getting even less restrictive.
I just thought I'd add the real reason Beta was Killed by VHS. And show Steemit is in the same postion as Beta right now. All it will take to kill Steemit would be a copy cat site with less restrictions and hassles and a block button, or FB to start letting users Monetize. Hopefully Steemit will rectify this before one of those happens.
I'm not sure of your age or if you were around during the VHS and Betamax situation like I was (but I was very young). While yes there was porn, it was not that pervasive. A friend of mine's mother ran the VHS rental shop in my town that first appeared and yes she did have some porn. That was not the bulk of her rentals by a long shot.
Yet every house started wanting a VCR, and video rental places were springing up all over the place, many that had zero porn and were thriving.
Porn may have been a factor, but it was far from the reason.
The real reason was that you could only buy a Betamax from Sony. So they removed the competition feature of the market.
VHS you could get from Philips, RCA, and on an on, eventually even Sony.
There was competition and it helped control prices, and pushed for better and better implementations.
It also saturated the market, and the same thing I used to tell people making games. If your goal is to be a successful game company are you going to aim at releasing your title for 10% of the market or 90% of the market. The math is easy. Now some might do both, but if they have to pick ONE the people that stay in business tend to pick the bigger market.
Interesting information. Thank you for sharing!
@dwinblood I loved my Comodore 64 when I was younger. It was one of my most favorite computers.
I would agree with your thoughts that Bitcoin will be displaced in the future. However I disagree with the assertion Dash's biggest win is in the marketing and branding arena. I absolutely agree it is a strong point for them, I think it's other pieces which may propel Dash to the #1 spot.
One trend in the marketplace has been investor demand for coins which focus on anonymity and privacy. If you look at Dash, ZCash, Monero and PIVX, there appears to be a strong investor appetite for cryptos which anonymize transactions on the blockchain.
I think the second, and possibly more influential trend, which will propel Dash to the top spot is their dogged focus on making Dash something your grandmother could use and be comfortable with. They get that crypto nerds like wallets, hoops and exchanges, but non-crypto nerds will either fear it or feel it's scammy as shit. When I saw evolution, I realized someone finally has made crypto for the layman. It's easy and I think it's a much better introduction to cryptos than tape-painting exchanges.
Last trend which leads me to think it will displace Bitcoin is it's taking a page from what pushed Bitcoin to the fringes of mainstream - it's creating utility and monetary exchange velocity by getting a branded prepaid MasterCard for Dash holders to use. No other crypto outside of Bitcoin holds that distinction. If Charlie Shrem gets his proposal approved, this would be something massive. The average person doesn't give a shit about hash rates, exchanges and the underlying tech. The first question they ask is, "where can I spend it?"
My hope is someday STEEM has a prepaid Mastercard or VISA. I think Steemit is positioned perfectly for bringing financial services to the unbanked. If Steemit chose to embrace this and make the UX much simpler (like Dash), I think it could become the top coin.
I agree.
I just wrote this related post yesterday.
In short, we can start crowdfunding our steem to create supplemental reward structures in a decentralized fashion in order to incentivize the things that we think will bolster the block chain.
One group could pay rewards when the value of steem goes up, another could reward authors with high page view counts, another could reward voters with low downvote percentages, yet another could reward whatever metrics marketing people track, and so on. Anything that can be measured can be rewarded, if some group thinks it's important.
To the best of my knowledge, no other blockchain has created connections between hundreds or thousands of human minds. That interconnectedness is (or should be) STEEM's biggest advantage. STEEM has created a human super-brain on the blockchain. If we figure out how to focus that creative capability in a productive way, nothing can compete with it.
That is more tech, when the historical cases tend to show it was the marketing and openness that propelled the other techs to victory.
So we need marketing, and we need to be plugging steem all over the place.
We can create the most amazing tech in the world, without marketing though that amazing tech likely will not reach the user base.
What about the old tape drives. I remember I always had problems with those. I also remember Atari 400 I would write "stories" but you couldn't save anything.
With the Timex Sinclair you could use a regular tape cassette player, you just had to listen to all the analog modem like squeeling as you loaded something, and you had to record that with a condenser mic to save it.
Very insightful argument. Upvoted and esteemed. Funny, I have warned about this very thing a number of years ago with my concern for the direction of Bitshares, (Steemit sister product). Interesting that in doing so, I used the very same Betamax-VHS analogy. It is a very poignant historical lesson in business competition. Bitshares, (as is Steem) is quite a superior tech. However from present view it looks like my concerns were well founded. (though it may have a come-back with new vision, fresh leadership and rebranding.) . Great technology without proper product positioning, marketing and PR will land only a "goose egg".
Rumour had it Betamax lost because you couldn't get any porn in that format.
Also, I still prefer the Minidisk sound quality over MP3, but the disks were bothersome compared to MP3 storage.
The images on CRTs look better than on LCDs for many purposes (moving images, colour space, etc.), but they are very bulky and power-hungry.
It almost seems non-functional specs trump functional specs. Convenience over quality, something like that, as if people care less and less about the primary goal of technology.
So, a bit of shameless marketing, use in the real world for payments implementable by everyone, and ease of use?
Well MP3 is a lossy compression, but how big you allow it to make the files can make a big difference in the sound.
There was porn, but that was not even close to the bulk of video sales back then so I'd be very skeptical of that rumor. :) And lack of porn if that was a case would have been again due to proprietary nature.
Yep I remember those days. I first had a TI99 by Texas Instruments with 16k!!! My buddies had the Vic 20 but I got the Amiga!!!! I think you are one to a good point here! Thanks for the memories...oh remember those laser disks the size of a album!
My first was actually a Timex sinclair 1000 with 2k of RAM. I eventually bought a 16K expansion module, and right after that I bought a Commodore 64 which I used massive amounts for years until I got an Amiga 2000.
I used my Commodore 64 so heavily I actually had to rebuild it and replace the keyboard a few times... and it's keyboard was PART of the computer, so not like today where you go buy an inexpensive external keyboard.
I dinked around on some TI99s when I visited other peoples houses, and I messed with a VIC 20 a few times which was a lower powered version of my Commodore 64. :)
I do remember the Laser disks...
Also remember the games made using them like Space Ace, and Dragons Lair.
OMG yes I do remember the Timex Sinclair LOL!
I just now snapped a pic of this...
You probably remember seeing these then lol. My late brother in law kept his! I got it sitting on the shelf lol.
My version of that was modded by me... the top shell was removed and I had a cable running from inside of that drive to my Commodore 64. :)
Amiga still has technological advances that the modern computer does not.
It was my favorite machine I ever owned. :) Kind of died after my first son decided to stick playing cards through all the slots like he had seen people inserting CDs. :) Opened up the case and it was full of cards. :P
Such as super easy to use RAM DISK. I used that like mad. I'd dump my entire OS build into it, and my machine ran very fast because of it. :) Not to mention the OS was pretty damn awesome for how little space it took.