At 8:22 PM -0800 9/26/96, jim bell wrote:
Remember the VHS/Beta VCR wars? With a fairly equal market in about 1978, Beta died 10 years later because the market couldn't support two incompatible standards. It wasn't that one was dramatically better than the other, it was simply that having two standards forced the market to duplicate stocks, for the machines as well as tapes, particularly pre-recorded tapes. Notice, however, that VCR's are relatively "isolated": It doesn't really matter if you have one format and your neighbor has another, unless you want to swap tapes. But crypto telephones inherently require (in the long term) full intercompability. If you didn't have that, there'd be half a world of people you couldn't call!
Be careful when drawing conclusions from the "VCR Wars." (BTW, James Lardner has a book out on this subject.) There are various interpretations of what happened. While I, for example, had both formats, I ultimately shelved my Beta unit. Some views often heard: * The longer recording time of VHS was more compelling to most consumers than the higher quality of Beta. Not surprising in the late 70s, early 80s, when most consumers had televisions incapable of showing the difference in quality. (Even today, most consumers are happy to rent VHS tapes which are rather "dodgy" in quality.) * VHS was "Pretty Good Video," and PGV was enough for its time. * Once VHS took a lead over Beta, the snowball effect took hold. Video rental stores started to appear in earnest in around 1980, and by then VHS had enough of a lead over Beta to cause the stores to stock VHS tapes for rental over Beta tapes. This dramatically widened the lead of VHS over Beta. (Jim's point: "Notice, however, that VCR's are relatively "isolated": It doesn't really matter if you have one format and your neighbor has another, unless you want to swap tapes." But in fact a large fraction of all VHS owners use their machines to _rent_ tapes, so the compatibility with what the many rental stores carry is paramount.) A tenuous link to crypto is that various VCR formats can still intercommunicate because they all use NTSC (or PAL, SECAM in some countries) as the "common language." This is analogous to the way various flavors of PGP on various platforms can communicate with other flavors because ASCII text is read and written by all. As I have argued many times, this was really the Big Win for PGP, that it did not use an odd or proprietary format that was platform-specific. Such basic ASCII operation ensures interoperability, and is of course inconsistent with the government talk of making sure that key-escrow products cannot interoperate with non-key-escrow or "alternately"-escrowed products. --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."