3 ms·

I don't think you're disagreeing with me here. The "worse is better" principle often boils down to a few fundamentals: "A functioning program is always better t

I don't think you're disagreeing with me here. The "worse is better" principle often boils down to a few fundamentals: "A functioning program is always better than a non-functioning one" and "an understandable product or specification is always better than one that cannot be understood". Intel also made, and probably still does make RISC chips. The i960 and i860 are just two examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860 They never took off on any appreciable scale. > You're not necessarily buying x86, but rather buying the best silicon that happens to speak x86. Or more specifically, you're buying the best chip that runs your existing software and works with the toolset you're familiar with. This is why Intel's Itanium project was doomed from the day they announced it. Nobody was going to re-write everything to work with their new instruction set. It's notable that Apple managed to go from 68K to PPC to x86 to x64 almost seamlessly, but they did that at the expense of backwards compatibility. You can run many Windows apps from the 3.1 days in current versions of Windows without emulation, but you can't run Mac software from the 68K days without it. Two different approaches. The Intel world is ruled, if not held hostage to backwards compatibility concerns. "Better" means "more traditional".

mikeash 10y ago
I didn't really mean to disagree. (Although I know that's usually the default assumption!) A lot of people don't realize that VHS had real advantages besides just adoption, and I mostly just wanted to elaborate on that a bit.
- astrodust 10y ago
  On paper Beta was better, and that's why the broadcast industry used it almost exclusively. For consumers VHS was good enough for their needs, and the EP mode in particular, where you could record multiple hours of television on one cassette (6?) made it far superior. VHS looked like garbage, Beta always looked better, but VHS was cheaper, more convenient, and ubiquitous. You're right about the length thing being a hassle. Friends who had Beta decks always had to jockey tapes in the middle of a movie, not unlike later when you had to flip a laserdisc. It was always a point of ridicule. Looks great, if not amazing, but you were always X minutes away from having to get up and change tapes. VHS could handle even the longest movies with ease, though often the quality would suffer accordingly.
  - cestith 10y ago
    Actually Beta wasn't last as it wasn't a two-way race. Philips VCR, Video 2000, laserdisc, RCA Selectrivision, and more. The initial cost of a Beta player or recorder was generally higher than VHS, and Sony waited a long time to license the tech. JVC licensed VHS early and widely. Sony had actually bet on one hour initially because TV shows were mostly half an hour or an hour. This left movies and sporting events mainly as the issues with recording time. They eventually brought out longer tapes, but it was a combination of factors up to that point that kept Beta from leading. Now, compare and contract MiniDisc vs. CD, Memory Stick vs SD, UMD vs. Download vs. SD, and where Sony actually won with Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. MiniDisc went away. Memory Stick mostly went away. UMD went away. But where Sony widely licensed the superior technology early on, it won.
wolfgke 10y ago
> You can run many Windows apps from the 3.1 days in current versions of Windows without emulation Only on 32 bit versions of Windows (and even this only sometimes works by this time). But note that the main reason why you cannot run Win16 applications on 64 bit Windows is not: - that you cannot run 16 bit applications in long mode (you can - look up the details of in the Intel documentation if you don't believe; just generate a suitable segment descriptor) - Virtual 8086 is not supported in Long Mode (it is indeed not - but this is only important for applications running in real mode (e.g. DOS applications) and thus is not of importance for Win16 applications) as it is often claimed in the internet, but has to do with Windows' architecture: > https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384249.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384249.aspx "Note that 64-bit Windows does not support running 16-bit Windows-based applications. The primary reason is that handles have 32 significant bits on 64-bit Windows. Therefore, handles cannot be truncated and passed to 16-bit applications without loss of data. Attempts to launch 16-bit applications fail with the following error: ERROR_BAD_EXE_FORMAT.".

mikeash 10y ago

I didn't really mean to disagree. (Although I know that's usually the default assumption!) A lot of people don't realize that VHS had real advantages besides just adoption, and I mostly just wanted to elaborate on that a bit.

astrodust 10y ago
On paper Beta was better, and that's why the broadcast industry used it almost exclusively. For consumers VHS was good enough for their needs, and the EP mode in particular, where you could record multiple hours of television on one cassette (6?) made it far superior. VHS looked like garbage, Beta always looked better, but VHS was cheaper, more convenient, and ubiquitous. You're right about the length thing being a hassle. Friends who had Beta decks always had to jockey tapes in the middle of a movie, not unlike later when you had to flip a laserdisc. It was always a point of ridicule. Looks great, if not amazing, but you were always X minutes away from having to get up and change tapes. VHS could handle even the longest movies with ease, though often the quality would suffer accordingly.
- cestith 10y ago
  Actually Beta wasn't last as it wasn't a two-way race. Philips VCR, Video 2000, laserdisc, RCA Selectrivision, and more. The initial cost of a Beta player or recorder was generally higher than VHS, and Sony waited a long time to license the tech. JVC licensed VHS early and widely. Sony had actually bet on one hour initially because TV shows were mostly half an hour or an hour. This left movies and sporting events mainly as the issues with recording time. They eventually brought out longer tapes, but it was a combination of factors up to that point that kept Beta from leading. Now, compare and contract MiniDisc vs. CD, Memory Stick vs SD, UMD vs. Download vs. SD, and where Sony actually won with Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. MiniDisc went away. Memory Stick mostly went away. UMD went away. But where Sony widely licensed the superior technology early on, it won.

wolfgke 10y ago

> You can run many Windows apps from the 3.1 days in current versions of Windows without emulation Only on 32 bit versions of Windows (and even this only sometimes works by this time). But note that the main reason why you cannot run Win16 applications on 64 bit Windows is not: - that you cannot run 16 bit applications in long mode (you can - look up the details of in the Intel documentation if you don't believe; just generate a suitable segment descriptor) - Virtual 8086 is not supported in Long Mode (it is indeed not - but this is only important for applications running in real mode (e.g. DOS applications) and thus is not of importance for Win16 applications) as it is often claimed in the internet, but has to do with Windows' architecture: > https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384249.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384249.aspx "Note that 64-bit Windows does not support running 16-bit Windows-based applications. The primary reason is that handles have 32 significant bits on 64-bit Windows. Therefore, handles cannot be truncated and passed to 16-bit applications without loss of data. Attempts to launch 16-bit applications fail with the following error: ERROR_BAD_EXE_FORMAT.".