Top 10 Format Wars and Who Won

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Күн бұрын

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Coming up:
10. DVD vs. DIVX
9. VHS-C vs. Video 8
8. Super Audio CD vs. DVD-Audio
7. Sirius vs. XM
6. 8-Track vs. Cassette
5. Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD
4. Disk Records vs. Wax Cylinders
3. VHS vs. Betamax
2. The Home Computer War
1. Alternating Current vs. Direct Current
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Пікірлер: 491

@cfltheman 5 жыл бұрын

There is a difference between DIVX and DivX. The failed alternative disk by Circuit City was DIVX. The other one is a compressed file format.

@silkwesir1444 5 жыл бұрын

Thanks. This confused me quite a bit.

@alexdhall 5 жыл бұрын

Yeah, that logo is for the video codec, DivX...

@JackDecker63 5 жыл бұрын

Another format war was automobiles. The format war was gasoline vs. steam vs. battery. No, I am not talking about now but at the beginning of the use of automobiles. Gasoline won because steam took too long to get going and was notorious for blowing up (steam pressure) AND battery took too long to charge and had too small of a range of travel.

@gordonlawrence4749 5 жыл бұрын

People forget that some of the earliest cars were electric.

@dwc1964 5 жыл бұрын

Lately the format war - given the widespread understanding among everyone but a few ideological die-hards that the days of ICE are numbered - is between battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell, with battery electric enjoying a strong and seemingly insurmountable lead at present, but with hydrogen fuel cell showing promise in larger-scale and longer-range applications such as long-haul trucking and ferry boats. (We're getting our first fuel-cell-powered ferry in the San Francisco Bay right about now.) In this case, they're not necessarily incompatible and can easily be used in combination, but that doesn't prevent fans on both sides from getting super-partisan about it.

@heronimousbrapson863 5 жыл бұрын

Jack Decker Also, distribution systems increasingly used AC and electric car batteries required DC. DC was difficult and expensive to derive from AC at that time.

@whatyousaidbud 5 жыл бұрын

@@dwc1964 whether you are for or against electric cars, the fact remains that if we all had one the only way to charge them would be to build more nuclear power stations, personally I think burning oil is safer.

@dwc1964 5 жыл бұрын

@@whatyousaidbud I disagree with every single thing you've said. 1. Even if every automobile were battery powered, it would not increase aggregate electrical demand the way the anti-EV talking points say. For one thing - out of many - they fail to take into account the large amounts of electricity required to refine oil into gasoline, that will no longer be happening. 2. Static storage batteries exist, so the argument that the intermittency of solar, wind, etc. is a fatal flaw is invalid. 3. While I'm extremely skeptical of atomic fission as an energy source, the reality of global warming & climate change due to the (in geological time) instantaneous release of carbon that had been previously buried miles underground for hundreds of thousands or millions of years - that reality is upon us. And as such, I'm starting to soften my anti-nuke stance somewhat. Though I still think solar, wind, etc. are a better solution.

@wookiedog 5 жыл бұрын

Commodore64 then the Amiga. Growing up in the 80's. Great memories 👍

@zippy-zappa-zeppo-zorba-etc 5 жыл бұрын

The Amiga was superior to just about everything else at the time. You could run different format windows at the same time. Even today the entire screen on all other machines have to be all one format.

@thesparkster 5 жыл бұрын

One of the things that killed the Betamax was licensing. Just like IBM tried to force PC card manufacturers to pay licensing to create Micro-Channel Architecture cards for their IBM PCs, Sony was charging Betamax clone and tape manufacturers a fee to make their products, while Toshiba pretty much opened up the VHS licensing. As such, that helped provide the kiss of death to Betamax.

@smwsmwsmw 5 жыл бұрын

Was going to mention this; it's part of what contributed to the higher cost of Betamax. It's tough to say whether it was the price or the recording time that gave VHS the edge, but the combination of those two advantages certainly didn't hurt it.

@robertt9342 5 жыл бұрын

I thought AC was better for transmitting over long distance with less loss, not cause it was "faster"?

@puncheex2 5 жыл бұрын

It's the fact you can step it up and down with a transformer. When going long distances, step it up to high voltages to have less loss in the wire, then step it down at the other end. Can't easily do that with DC.

@cr10001 5 жыл бұрын

@@puncheex2 High voltage DC transmission is used for long undersea cables where the losses from capacitance with the surroundings would be excessive for AC. The extra complication in generating the HV DC and converting it back to AC at the destination are justified by the lower transmission losses. But AC is much easier to handle with transformers in transmission networks. The idea of 'lower losses' with AC is, I think, because high voltage AC is easily produced, whereas DC tends to be lower voltage, hence requires higher currents (for the same power), hence higher resistance losses in the cables.

@duanesamuelson2256 4 жыл бұрын

@@cr10001 high voltage long distance transmission lines overland are also DC in the US. Impedance losses above "x" voltage exceed resistance voltage and makes the investment in the equipment to convert to AC worth it. In addition with high voltage AC you have the issues with inductance losses. The first high voltage AC line put in to NY had people injured and killed when they completed the circuit using their bodies to metal sheds and fences adjacent to the power lines. NYSEG (whatever it was back then) paid a small fortune going back and grounding everything metal along the transmission line. Of course people being people also started running parallel wires to steal power intentionally. Local grids AC is preferable since as you said its easy to convert to the desired voltage, a lighter gage wire can be used since you can toss a transformer about anywhere you want to step down the voltage allowing local grids to operate at medium voltage of 30kv or so and stepped down to the needed voltage adjacent at the point of use.

@SaturnCanuck 5 жыл бұрын

Very nice. You forgot Polaroid and Kodak Instant. Polaroid certainly got there first, but Kodak’s film and resolution was better. Combined with their “trimprint” that allowed consumers to remove the picture from the plastic backing and treat this as a regular picture was a bonus - and something the Polaroids could not do. Who won? Well in 1985 Polaroid sued Kodak on copyright (patent ) grounds and filed an injunction to stop Kodak selling the film and cameras until the lawsuit was finalized. Kodak realized that while they might win they would lose millions defending their separate patents and with cameras and film rotting in warehouses, Kodak acquiesced and dropped the whole product line.

@SaturnCanuck 5 жыл бұрын

No sir. They did not. As I said Polaroid sued Kodak for Patent infringement and then filed an injunction preventing Kodak from both making and distributing their "instant" film and cameras until the lawsuit was complete. Once Kodak complied and removed them from shelves (or actually, me and my hard-working staff), Polaroid felt -- and perhaps rightly so -- that they had won and did not pursue the suit any further. As well Kodak was forced to give recompense to all owners of the cameras which cost them millions Thus, the case never went to court and no monetary awards were allocated (aside from the above). Two things on this. One. Polaroid never sued Kodak until the latter introduced the “Trimprint” version of their film that allowed customers to remove the photo from the backing once dry to have a regular picture. Polaroid never saw the Kodak film as a threat until then. Why? Two. There were many differences between the Polaroid and Kodak films, not the least of which was that the Kodak emulsion was exposed from the rear and Polaroid from the front. This allowed for “Trimprint” which was Kodak’s goal all along. Thus, due to this, I feel the Kodak film was different enough to not be a patent infringement, but alas, we will never know. However, the Kodak Instant does live on in film (pun intended). The photo the little boy takes and sells to Sarah Conner at the end of “The Terminator” was a Kodak Instant.

@PaulMeranda 5 жыл бұрын

as an amateur audio engineer & transcoding nerd of 18yrs+ now, this episode was particularly entertaining for me.. thank you for all you do, TopTenz crew 💙 now if* it could only show up in my sub feed au'do-magically, instead of having to go search for it when TIFO goes up...

@DanceySteveYNWA 5 жыл бұрын

The satisfaction of popping the copy protection tabs on a new cassette/VHS tape though..

@MosoKaiser 5 жыл бұрын

And then later putting electrical tape over the hole when you wanted to tape over that VHS.

@Duececoupe 5 жыл бұрын

Never get tired of your channels....another winner here! 😎👍🏻👌🏻👏🏻

@peteregan9750 5 жыл бұрын

a mac is now just a pc (Same Internal x86 architecture since 2006) running a bsd unix system with a lot of linux GNU free software under GPL licence

@thomasdarby6084 5 жыл бұрын

Don't forget, before the 8-track were the 4-track machines. My father's new Ford Country Squire wagon came with one... which neither my father or I ever used.

@dx1450 5 жыл бұрын

When I was growing up we had a stereo with 8-track capability. To this day I'll never forget the sound of the 8-track changing channels. kachunk!

@writerpatrick 5 жыл бұрын

Not to mention that reel-to-reel preceded cassettes.

@eddymison3527 5 жыл бұрын

Sony has been involved in so many format wars...

@ikesileth2270 5 жыл бұрын

This is a cool video topic nice work!

@cynthiaslater7445 5 жыл бұрын

I still my Commodore 64 and Colt. I liked the 64 for games and the Colt for productivity. Also, programming was easy to learn on the 64.

@DeepSabbathCult 5 жыл бұрын

I recently read up on the format war that occurred over railway gauges, specifically in the UK during the 19th century.

@demoscat 5 жыл бұрын

When the railroad gauge in the southern US was changed to standard gauge. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/atxoZKqo2pymhHk.html

@DeepSabbathCult 5 жыл бұрын

@@demoscat Thank you!!

@chuckkissel2785 5 жыл бұрын

Awesome video

@samuellawrencesbookclub8250 5 жыл бұрын

Who won Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD? Standard DVD, sure HD-DVD did fail, while Blu-Ray is still around, but - because they are cheaper, and still made - DVDs bought far more often than Blu-Rays, except by video-philes, who are a very niche market.

@MosoKaiser 5 жыл бұрын

Well, the Blu Ray vs. HD-DVD war was won by the former, with Toshiba officially conceding the competition. The eventual withering of the Blu Ray market due to the meteoric rise of streaming services that was just around the corner is a separate thing, IMO.

@collectingonthecheap56353 5 жыл бұрын

I still find it interesting that standard DVD is still being manufactured and sold in 2019.

@nightshadeisis2263 5 жыл бұрын

And considering that many movies nowadays are either a 3-package BluRay/DVD/Digital or a 4-package that includes 4K, I don't see DVDs going anywhere.

@Markle2k 5 жыл бұрын

DVD and Blu-Ray sort of merged. Those who don't mind paying a lot for a single use device may have a Blu-Ray player. Others have one by default in a game console. Everybody used to have a DVD player by default if they had a computer. But now you can even stream or download from the package.

@samuellawrencesbookclub8250 5 жыл бұрын

@@collectingonthecheap56353 It's probably because they still sell well, while Blu-Ray never hit the mainstream market

@Henchman1977 5 жыл бұрын

I worked at Radio Shack. I couldn't tell you how many times I had to explain to people that an 8mm/hi-8 VCR tape adapter didn't exist like it did for VHS-C.

@keensoundguy6637 5 жыл бұрын

And how many times did you ask for a customer's phone number when they came in to buy, say, just batteries?

@AtheistOrphan 5 жыл бұрын

Ian Colquhoun - Same here!

@bmgcasanova 5 жыл бұрын

Nice subject! Wish I could give you 👍👍👌!

@johnscott434 5 жыл бұрын

Forgot to mention Texas Instruments home computer TI-99 in the early 1980s. The company killed their desktop computer due to insisting on sticking to proprietary formats, maintaining a policy of discouraging hobbyists from making modifications and software companies had a hard time finding people who knew how to program using it's assembly language.

@exastrisscientia8656 5 жыл бұрын

Simon, another great video. Wondering how many retakes you had to do, with all the brand names and acronyms.

@7beauties7 5 жыл бұрын

The Commodore Amiga 1000 was light years ahead of anything else when it debuted. It had GUI and a color monitor. Electronic Arts was founded to create games for it. Despite the emergence of Toaster, the Commodore Amiga died out by the mid '90s.

@Discosaturn 5 жыл бұрын

Here's another format war that you probably never heard of... Laserdisc vs. CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc), or also known as videodisc The difference between the two? Laserdiscs are read optically with a laser beam while CEDs are read physically with a stylus similar to a phonograph record. The two systems are mutually incompatible; the CED was made obsolete by Laserdiscs by 1986.

@jackofallgamesTV 2 жыл бұрын

I think the "brand name" of a CED was a Selectavision Disc. But that was the name used by RCA, the format inventor. Just like B Cord was Sanyo's name for Beta, there were alternate names.

@TheAnadromist 5 жыл бұрын

GD vs. Vinyl LPs would have been very interesting since it looked like vinyl was completely dead. And now? Vinyl's in it for the long haul. CD's being squeezed out.

@writerpatrick 5 жыл бұрын

CDs were considered to have poorer quality audio, but they were much more convenient than vinyl.

@TheAnadromist 5 жыл бұрын

@@writerpatrick CDs in 80's and most of the 90's were extremely tinny and compressed. Although the mp3 listening soul today would think otherwise. I bought vinyl as much as possible in the 90's. And I am glad to see them back as a viable option. I bought another turntable two years ago.

@Nerdbomber586 5 жыл бұрын

Great video. I thought you were going to roll into the USB Firewire war when talking about peripherals.

@vickievegas1837 5 жыл бұрын

Ah you missed my favorite one. iPod v Zen player. The zen was what I had. I heard the reason iPod won out because they marketed toward school kids and gave some away. Then every other kid wanted what the other kids had. That’s genius if that’s true.

@garyoa1 5 жыл бұрын

Jobs was a marketing genius. Stuck with some computers, donated them to schools. Kids learned how to use the apple, got out of school and had no idea how to run a pc so bought macs.

@92RKID 5 жыл бұрын

Vickie Vegas, I used to have a Zen creative player. I had it for a long time. It was great while it lasted. I finally gave it away to be recycled a few years ago.

@PurplePinkRed 5 жыл бұрын

Had no idea about this! Thank you for sharing 😊

@krystalskye949 5 жыл бұрын

that isn't necessarily a "format" war. I do believe both used MP3 format. All that would be is a brand war (apple vs pc), much like auto brands (gm vs ford vs chrysler vs all other manufacturing groups)

@vickievegas1837 5 жыл бұрын

Alison Jordan I still have mine somewhere I saw it when I packed. It’s been two years since we moved so it’s probably packed in the garage somewhere. Yikes!

@catjudo1 5 жыл бұрын

Nine out of Ten elephants prefer Tesla-Westinghouse! Vote NO on Edison!

@chelsealouwho8071 3 жыл бұрын

LMAO

@deonmurphy6383 5 жыл бұрын

Within AC power the frequency was unsettled until as late as the late 1940’s. SCE and LADWP operated at 50 Hz. Six of the units at Hoover Dam were installed capable (I.e. wound) such that they could operate at 50 or 60 Hz. Likewise some of the early pumping stations in the Phoenix area operated at 25 Hz. Interconnected Grid operation for reliability forced it to go to 60 Hz (in North America).

@cr10001 5 жыл бұрын

True. And American (including South America??) domestic power is 110v 60Hz, whereas most of the rest of the world uses 230v 50Hz. This used to matter a lot more before modern solid-state digital devices which just use an input power supply circuit (which can usually handle either voltage) to drop the input power to their chosen DC voltage. Oh, and PAL vs NTSC TV formats.

@valfletcher9285 5 жыл бұрын

Does anyone remember Video Disks (they were large and not compact) and reel-to-reel sound?

@keensoundguy6637 5 жыл бұрын

RCA had the CED discs and I can't recall the other format. Both were inferior to the laserdisc.

@BadWebDiver 5 жыл бұрын

My Dad had a reel-to-reel audio recorder. I grew up with using them for school and hobby projects. Don't remember any commercial music being released on the format though. Cassettes essentially replaced them for public use, mainly due to portability. I think some pros still use them, same with video playback machines for tv studios and such. I think digital is practically taking over though now.

@HarshveerPoonia 5 жыл бұрын

Top video guys

@Textile_Courtesan 5 жыл бұрын

Ironically, my first introduction to the home pc was IBM where my school had a contract with them. As a field trip, we got to tour the headquarters and they supplied our school with 20 computers in my grade school. My personal first home computer was a Commadore 64, which I used as a gaming consol, which was extremely outdated because my friends were using Dreamcasts, Segas and Nintendo 64s. I also have a healthy collection of movies on VHS.

@CosRacecar 5 жыл бұрын

I think even bigger then any of these, at least in the number of major players, was the war over early digital camera and camcorder storage formats. You had MMC vs SD vs CF vs xD vs Memory Stick vs XQD vs all the mini CD and hdd formats.

@kevinsmith5318 5 жыл бұрын

These videos are always well researched and presented. Where can i get a Simon Whistler t-shirt?

@WildStar2002 4 жыл бұрын

Oooh, I had an Atari 800 computer - loved it! *Pole Position*! I had that game, too!

@Sacto1654 5 жыл бұрын

I wonder was the MP3 versus AAC audio compression format a little bit too technical for your list.

@andrewreadcanberra 5 жыл бұрын

You missed 110V 60Hz vs 240V 50Hz electricity supply (not to mention plug and pin patterns) and Left-hand drive vs Right-hand drive cars

@NikkoJames 5 жыл бұрын

There's also 100V and 220V standards, which makes things more confusing.

@Markle2k 5 жыл бұрын

The only place where there's a "war" over the first is in Japan. And it is a settled truce far more peaceful than on the Korean Peninsula. The second only come to clash with one another at the Hong Kong border crossing into China.

@flowertrue 5 жыл бұрын

There were also format wars in the earlier days of digital storage. The ZIP drive vs the DVD-RW. Zip drive never stood a chance.

@littlearsehole75 5 жыл бұрын

Before watching this video, DVDA meant something different to me...

@BasementBerean 5 жыл бұрын

Then there was the corkscrew vs. double helix DNA format war of 5,000,000,000 BC. Critics of the Double Helix said the two helices were prone to getting tangled up together in early prototypes, and that the corkscrew format would be more reliable, but the double helix won because it could divide and the corkscrew could not.

@rgerber 5 жыл бұрын

Basement Berean they clearly failed at marketing

@Madtownbiochem 5 жыл бұрын

I blame topoisomerase for getting involved...

@mrjohndoe6331 5 жыл бұрын

Really good and intresting video. But you missed the Video 2000, that Sony tried outmatch VHS

@ianrazey8412 5 жыл бұрын

I thought Video 2000 was Philips?

@tamalanelson2407 3 жыл бұрын

You forgot about Tandy’s TRS-80, affectionately called the trash-80. The brand new computer lab at my high school (1980ish) was filled with 10 of those one piece jewels. 😝

@keensoundguy6637 5 жыл бұрын

With 8-track cartridges, you couldn't skip forward to the next song. The tape had 8 parallel tracks and the tape head would read two tracks at a time (for stereo). When you pressed the channel button to select the next of the 4 channels (2 tracks per channel * 4 channels = 8 tracks) -- and you could only select the channels sequentially from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 1 -- the playback head would move up or down the width of the tape to align with the next pair of tracks. So typically changing channels would put you somewhere in the middle of a song. The tape was one long loop with the end of the tape spliced to the beginning with a metal foil. When the foil passed a sensor, the heads would automatically move to the next channel. The song order would often be jumbled compared to the LP so as to equally fill up each channel as much as possible, otherwise you'd have a lot of silence (well, tape hiss) before you got around to that splice. This channel switching is very different from the track switching feature of CDs. In fact CD track switching is more similar to LPs. With LPs you could easily and quickly skip to another track by lifting the tonearm and moving it forward or backward. With practice you could become accurate at placing the stylus exactly at the start of a desired track (except perhaps on those albums that didn't have clear banding). Some 8-track players added a fast-forward feature, but of course due to how the tape was looped it wasn't possible to "rewind" the tape. AC is distributed at very high voltages because for the same power, the current will be less for higher voltage, and therefore there will be less power loss (which is proportional to the square of the current and the cable resistance). This is especially important as you distribute over long distances.

@ninatouchdown2500 5 жыл бұрын

The DVD has an ancestor the size of a record that was launched in the early 80s, but it never caught on.

@lexzbuddy 5 жыл бұрын

8 tracks got chewed up all the time.

@christinebrown3359 5 жыл бұрын

Years from now we will find out which subscription video streaming service wins, or which personal voice assistant wins (Siri, Alexa, or Google). It will be interesting to see.

@rgerber 5 жыл бұрын

Christine Brown are you a nerd?

@christinebrown3359 5 жыл бұрын

@@rgerber sometimes I am a nerd, yes. But I could say the same for anyone who is interested in this topic.

@reggiefurlow1 5 жыл бұрын

I miss the sense of ownership of any of those formats that aren't completely digital

@ajtstvandmusicarchivechann1585 5 жыл бұрын

Blue rays and DVDs are still in use.

@ItsAsparageese 3 жыл бұрын

I agree. I like hoarding digitally and having less physical stuff, and I regain most of the sense of ownership/permanence by making sure I have true copies of most files and can back them up myself instead of using the cloud too much ... But I still feel you on the way it's nice to have physical versions to actually handle and look at and curate.

@FunkyMonkey-ip4xy 5 жыл бұрын

Betamax tapes could record for more than 60 minutes. I know because we had Betamax when I was a kid. You could get around 3 1/2 hours out of them, dependent on which tap s you had.

@otakuryoga 5 жыл бұрын

what really decided the beta/vhs war was Disney finally picking vhs exclusively instead of using both as it had been doing

@matteframe 5 жыл бұрын

#wrong

@hepchaos 5 жыл бұрын

The Betamax couldn't record for more than 60 minutes when it came out. It took 2 or 3 years for them to make a longer recording version, maybe even 5. By the time they did, they had the reputation of only having short recording tapes. Then JVC came out with the 4 hour tape, plus it was cheaper. Betamax never really recovered, even though they kept at it for a number of years.

@user-vg4zf2dr7p 6 ай бұрын

Super cool 😎 😊

@thedarksun8891 5 жыл бұрын

In case anyone is wondering, yes they make 8track to mp3 adaptors

@writerpatrick 5 жыл бұрын

With a simple audio adapter, you can plug an 8-track player into a computer.

@protectyourneck3042 5 жыл бұрын

Strangely fascinating

@Jeff121456 5 жыл бұрын

Transmission of ac electric currents is not faster than dc current. They both "transmit" current at just under the speed of light. Edison coined the term electrocution as a combination of electricity and execution.

@bigredc222 5 жыл бұрын

I found out a while back that the Three Gorges Damn produces DC at super high voltage for it's transmission lines, it's crazy, it goes against everything I've learned, I think it goes extreme distances without substations, have you learned anything about it?

@Jeff121456 5 жыл бұрын

@@bigredc222 the trouble with DC is that the wires themselves act as resistors and dissipates the power. Three Gorges operates at a 500 kilovolt range which reduces the effect of the wire resistance to a manageable level. If Edison had the capability to generate voltages that high we would probably have a DC distribution system in the US.

@bigredc222 5 жыл бұрын

@@Jeff121456 But why is 500 kv dc better than 500 kv a/c?

@Jeff121456 5 жыл бұрын

@@bigredc222 I don't think it is better. It may be that the infrastructure was cheaper.

@Jeff121456 5 жыл бұрын

@@bigredc222 HVDC only requires 2 lines vice 3 for HVAC and over very long distances HVDC has less loss than AC.

@EddieGaster 5 жыл бұрын

I remember the Commodore 64. Many great game on the computer.

@SIUMoose 5 жыл бұрын

And a format designed to teach BASIC programming. For my son's sake, I wish I still had mine...

@EddieGaster 5 жыл бұрын

@@SIUMoose They'd be worth a pretty penny now.

@ianrazey8412 5 жыл бұрын

I still have one. It is in its original box.

@ZhangtheGreat 5 жыл бұрын

Anyone remember the mid-90s large-storage disk wars? For a few years, Iomega and NEC were pushing Zip drives and disks that stored 100 MB per disk, which were hot because floppies could only store 1.44 MB. There were other large-storage disk drives too, most notably Micron's SuperDisk, which could store up to 120 MB and was backwards compatible with 1.44 MB floppies, but thanks to better marketing the Zip drive won out. Then came the USB storage drive era and all those disk drives went down the drain.

@garybarnes4169 5 жыл бұрын

14:40 "using a transformer let AC transmit current at much faster speeds". So much bollocks, that I can't even begin to explain.

@pjeaton58 5 жыл бұрын

Electricity travels at the speed of light period .... However higher voltages from AC transformers travel longer distances with less power loss - can Simon follow that?

@johnscallan5648 5 жыл бұрын

nice

@retsz 5 жыл бұрын

What about the most recent format war: PewDiePie vs T Series?

@shaneofastrotek 4 жыл бұрын

This one was fun

@force311999 2 жыл бұрын

there was a format war for mechanical vs electronic TV in the 30s and then the "color standard" in the 50s

@eliyahfeld 3 жыл бұрын

i saw the title and automatically "liked"

@PascalGienger 6 ай бұрын

Con Edison in NYC shut down their DC network just some years ago. They still had a few customers.

@anthonyguarino3025 5 жыл бұрын

F*** Thomas Edison. Sorry. Somebody needed to say that.

@ThomasTrue 5 жыл бұрын

And Nikola Tesla should have been given more emphasis than Westinghouse.

@mybraineatseverything7404 5 жыл бұрын

Yep. TESLA

@ffnendhgrgd 5 жыл бұрын

And Steve Jobs. And Bill Gates. And Walt Disney.

@rjd0429 5 жыл бұрын

I was at Edison's Menlo Park lab, now located at Greenfield Village in Dearborn Michigan, in August 2018. I watched and listened to a very animated, passionate and talented museum presenter who was an obvious Edison fan, demonstrate and present the many "achievements" created at the Edison lab. I was part of a crowd of about 18 in the lab. When he asked the crowd the question if they really knew the story about how electricity was brought to the masses, I responded "Tesla and his Alternating Current did that!" Several in the little crowd to start vocally agreeing with me. When the increasingly frustrated presenter asked the visitors what other inventions they could name that Edison created? I responded, "Edison stole from Tesla, and invented patent trolling as a result!" I got the majority of the men, who easily made up 3/4 of in the crowd, suddenly giving me cheers and applause. Mic drop moment for me! Tesla made our current advanced technology possible. Tesla understood the fundamentals of radio waves, he was the inventor of radio, not Marconi. Tesla knew cell phone tech long before the first brick phones of the 80's. Edison never invented nor created a damned thing on his own. His brilliant staff, which briefly included Tesla, did all the experimenting, conceptualizing, innovating and creating, at which point Edison would simply file the patent on his employee's creations and take credit for himself, since he was the employer. Other than that, Edison was just another so-called 19th Century "robber-baron," a man of his Victorian times. Tesla was a man who was more than half a century ahead of his time, he is a man of the late 20th and the first half of the 21st Century, so far.

@goodchessactor 5 жыл бұрын

In 1985 I bought a Xerox computer. Yes, a computer. I may have been the only one to buy one.

@puncheex2 5 жыл бұрын

SIgma 5 or Sigma 7?

@loranddeka 5 жыл бұрын

I miss my old Commadore PET. Complete with monochrome slime green monitor and magnetic tape drive.

@ktkat1949 5 жыл бұрын

In 1976 I got a big bonus at work and paid 1000. for a monstrously sized Beta player. A year later a friend bought the same machine for 300. They weighed about 50 pounds.

@daviddawson6553 5 жыл бұрын

Digital camera storage formats was confusing in the early days. Up to 7 different modes at one time

@herrgodfrey9563 5 жыл бұрын

I experienced the Mandella Effect, concerning alternating and direct current.

@BadWebDiver 5 жыл бұрын

How so?

@MitchCyan 5 жыл бұрын

“Oh no, Beta!”

@reggiefurlow1 5 жыл бұрын

Yes I'm a real nerd because I do love me a format war lol♥️

@pris0nergaming641 4 жыл бұрын

Commodore was my first computer first I had the VIC 20, then the 64 and the last one I had was the 128. First I started with tape for a storage device then eventually a floppy drive.

@smlwllk35 5 жыл бұрын

I wish they mentioned fast food...yesterday I went to burger king and ordered a whooper. They forgot my cheese and all the condiments. This is why they will ALWAYS BE NUMBER 2!

@godlovesyou1995 5 жыл бұрын

The Burger King > Ronald McDonald Clown

@musicalneptunian 5 жыл бұрын

Does W E N D Y 'S still exist?

@keensoundguy6637 5 жыл бұрын

BK isn't #2. Where I live I'm surprised they're still in business. And their recent "SJW" nonsense is likely losing them customers. Just Friday evening I drove past where there is a BK adjacent to a McD. The drive-thru for McD was full, BK's was empty and virtually no cars in the parking lot.

@rgerber 5 жыл бұрын

9:18 the handclap!

@afaegfsgsdef 3 жыл бұрын

I used to sell blank beta tapes to the Neilson ratings guys in the late 90's at RadioShack... They used them because the capacity is bigger than vhs

@stuarthirsch 5 жыл бұрын

Good video. A few things you missed. First there has been a lot of technology since the original current wars. Today it is as efficient to transmit DC as AC and perhaps more so because of inductive and capacitive losses in the long power lines. Also AC and DC are equally deadly at the same voltage and current levels. Other format wars took place the CBS rotating disk color TV format vs the NTSC electronic color TV format, HD and digital radio formats, and numerous HDTV technologies and formats.

@xandudicanda6303 5 жыл бұрын

DCB vs. SCI Bus. Who won? Actually, they joined forces and created MIDI, Musical Instruments Digital Interface.

@nunyabusinesss1476 5 жыл бұрын

Ha ha ! the sad part of that last #2 is that I had a C 64 and only encountered the apple 2e when I entered junior high school. Or maybe it was 6th grade as I vaguely remember playing Typing Tutor on an apple 2e. :D

@angelasimmons1360 5 жыл бұрын

Yes for giving Westinghouse credit!!

@benangel6831 5 жыл бұрын

Hurray for the Timex Sinclair - my first computer! It took a licking, and kept... um... on using cassette cartridges...

@tymmezinni 5 жыл бұрын

I worked in retail when DVD-R(W) vs DVD+R(W) was a big thing....

@darrenkirchhoff1693 5 жыл бұрын

We had Betamax tapes when I was a kid that could hold up to 4 hours of video, so lack of storage space wasn't the death knell this video makes it out to be.

@vernonbender3384 3 жыл бұрын

Beta was capeable of 4 hour play, with an LP (long play) setting, when VHS was still running at 2 hours. VHS did eventually incorporate the same type of setting, but Beta remained the superior system.

@SIUMoose 5 жыл бұрын

I agree wholeheartedly with your choices, but I was hoping to see Minidisk vs. Digital Audio Cassette. I remember a media push for DAC when I was in high school. Minidisk proved to be Superior and was used for field recording and other audio production work in the days before laptops and thumb drives became ubiquitous. Neither format ever caught on in the U.S. I'm not sure DAC ever caught on anywhere, while Minidisk remained popular in Japan well into the '00s.

@guy1642 5 жыл бұрын

String Bass players: French bow vs. German bow. LOL.

@daniellefelice7368 5 жыл бұрын

Guy Pidkameny in Chinese string instruments we have the same thing. Beijing bow vs Shanghai bow lol

@matteframe 5 жыл бұрын

Bronze versus steel? Thatch versus peat?

@latrobevalleyparanormaldet2157 5 жыл бұрын

CD vs MP3/4 would be interesting

@ericlurio246 5 жыл бұрын

Em Pee FOUR?!?!?!?!?!

@STEVE151079 5 жыл бұрын

Yay, I was the 1000th like! This is the TopTenz video I have been waiting for- I love format wars! Thank you Simon and team. Always think it’s interesting how AC is superior and is used universally except in Washington, where they still use DC to this day! Hence the name 😂😂

@Madtownbiochem 5 жыл бұрын

Would have liked NTSC vs PAL 😀

@ThomasTrue 5 жыл бұрын

"Never Twice Same Colour" vs "Picture Always Lousy".

@smwsmwsmw 5 жыл бұрын

They weren't competing formats, though. NTSC came first. The inventors of PAL had the benefit of seeing the problems with NTSC, and built on that. It's not like Europe had a format war.

@gregoryboyd7621 5 жыл бұрын

Young whippersnappers dont know a thing about 8track tape breaking, then taking the case apart and splicing the tape back together with the white repair tape.

@dx1450 5 жыл бұрын

I guess I'm not a young whippersnapper, though I was just a kid when 8-tracks were popular. I still remember hearing ads for music albums on TV say, "Available on LP, 8-track, or cassette."

@writerpatrick 5 жыл бұрын

@@dx1450 Pretty much all music released on 8-track and most cassette music was also available on record.

@dx1450 5 жыл бұрын

@@writerpatrick Yeah, in the late 70's though whenever K-tel would release a "best of" album or something, at the end of the commercial they'd always say that. I think the 8-track part started dropping off in the early 80's because even though they were still around, cassettes killed 8-tracks.

@nefariouspixelblood8514 3 жыл бұрын

meh VHS worked the same i remember having to splice VHS back together with scotch tape all the damn time. never had that problem with my 8-tracks, nope the tape in those always got stretched to a point of unusability

@MosoKaiser 5 жыл бұрын

3:20 Hah, neither SACD or DVD-A made much of an impact in the grand scheme of things. That was one format war where the outcome was one format just taking a bit longer to disappear from the market. :D But SACD players not being cheap even today? Well, I'm not sure if it can be called an _SACD player_ in the scrictest sense of the word, but earlier this year I picked up a Samsung DVD-HD945, a DVD player with SACD playback, for a whopping 30€ at a local thrift store. I have _no_ idea if I'll ever even have SACDs in my record collection, but hey, it's a nifty feature to have just in case! :D A nice bonus on top of it being a slick looking DVD player with a nice selection of output options.

@tncorgi92 5 жыл бұрын

I had a Timex Sinclair, I got it for free when I bought living room furniture. It had a miniscule memory capacity and a problematic keyboard. I guess you could say it was worth what I paid for it.

@sidbell929 5 жыл бұрын

That was what the Sinclair ZX80 was called in the US. I had the ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum (which was kind of an upgraded, colour version of the ZX's) Happy Days :-)

@kevinh96 5 жыл бұрын

There's a few others that haven't been included on this list. We tend to think of the battle between BluRay and HD DVD as the first videodisc format war, but it wasn't. In the early 80s Laserdisc hadn't really won over consumers, RCA launched a cheaper video disc system in it's CED Video Disc format. Basically movies on vinyl, although encased in a plastic caddy to protect the disc itself. It went head to head with Laserdisc, but back then consumers weren't really that interested in a non recordable format for movies as movies on VHS were good enough for our 21 inch CRT TVs, and of course we could record on blank VHS tapes too. CED died within a couple of years, while Laserdisc clung on even into the early 2000s positioning itself, once Pioneer took it over, as a format for serious movie collectors who wanted the highest quality for films at home. It stayed a niche format, but gained enough of a following for all of the big blockbuster films of the time to be released on the format. It was finally killed off by DVD, but not without a high definition version being launched in Japan to directly compete with DVD. A third videodisc format was also launched during that time, VED, although I don't think it made it out of Japan. Other notable format wars included the Minidisc vs DCC war of the early 90s, with minidisc winning but again not really becoming mainstream. Like Laserdisc it gained enough of a following in Europe and Japan to survive until fairly recently though, and still has an avid fan base with even new music being released on the format now and again.

@ThomasTrue 5 жыл бұрын

In the 1980s I had a Toshiba 32k computer, which ran Microsoft Extended (MSX) Basic. Although much easier to understand and a simpler programming language, and popular in both Japan and the Netherlands, MSX simply couldn't compete with the other, more common, languages.

@cooperjk55 5 жыл бұрын

The Sony mini disc as an honorable mention

@KaiHenningsen 5 жыл бұрын

Four missed ones off the top of my head: Cell phone standards, color television standards, railway track gauges, and electrification methods (third rail, catenary) and voltage/frequency standards.

@ninpodarren 5 жыл бұрын

I'm surprised to learn that number 1 is still current

@hepchaos 5 жыл бұрын

I have to say this, since no one else has; "boo". Just boo. lol

@franl155 5 жыл бұрын

I can remember when the benchmark for PCs had to be "IBM compatible". Boy, did they miss the bus ...

@writerpatrick 5 жыл бұрын

Another thing of note in the early computer wars: Apple made their schematics widely available so many clones appeared making Apple more popular. IBM kept theirs confidential. Later Apple designs were kept confidential but IBM clones became commonplace. IBM effectively lost the home computer war by giving away their OS, although they still produce business computers.

@Marco_Onyxheart 5 жыл бұрын

In regards of the PC format war, even gaming consoles these days are glorified PCs, using AMD64 CPUs and AMD GPUs.

@lordgarion514 5 жыл бұрын

If by "glorified' you mean horribly worse in literally every way, then sure, they're glorified.

@TheCgOrion 5 жыл бұрын

@@lordgarion514 Lol. I think he was just saying that at their heart, they're just PC architectures. Currently Jaguar cores for CPU (based off of an old mobile CPU), and GCN architecture, originally based off of the 7000 series AMD GPU's. Obviously the Pro and X have updated GPU's, but still the same CPU's, just clocked higher.

@Markle2k 5 жыл бұрын

His PC examples weren't really formats. RISC vs. CISC is a possible format rivalry. Firewire vs. USB is another.

@SquishySenpai 5 жыл бұрын

One of the biggest reasons why HD-DVD failed so hard is that unlike Blu-Ray on the PS3 you had to buy a separate external drive for the XBOX 360 at the cost of an extra $120 USD.

@nickhueper2906 5 жыл бұрын

Cool

@SylvainDuford 5 жыл бұрын

Actually, the standard L500 Betamax tapes ran to 120 minutes at BII speed and 210 minutes at BIII speed. Later, longer tapes could run as long as 5 hours. After Sony withdrew Beta from the consumer market, it went on successfully as a professional format for many years, even after VHS ceased to exist.