The Format Wars in retrospect.

[TonyDuell]

Originally Posted by Gulliver

Though it is worth noting that other less mainstream film formats are still catered for in small numbers including 110, 127, glass plates of various sizes....no 126, APS or disc though.

Well, if you are serious about wanting to use a 126 camera (a Contaflex 126, perhaps) you can get an adapter to use 35mm film in it :

https://analoguewonderland.co.uk/products/camerhack-fakmatic-adapter-for-126-film-cameras

There are other obscure formats where you have to trim down and spool film in a darkroom. But it's actually a lot easier to do that than to, say, read some obscure digital medium from scratch. I have a very early digital camera in my collection -- a Datacopy 300 -- which is so early that the CCD is a linear array of elements tracked across the image by a motor and leadscrew. I also have the PERQ workstation to control it. But I suspect few people could handle the images from it, an obscure format on a couple of 8" floppy disks/image. On the other hand it would be hard to find a serious photographer who couldn't get an image from a glass plate negative.

[G6Tanuki]

Another casualty from the Format Wars was WAP - Wireless Application Protocol. Most people have never heard of it or seen it.

It was designed to allow data to be transferred over a sort of extended SMS channel to first/second generation digital mobile phones to be displayed on a rather small monochrome LCD. Remember that back in the past you paid a lot to ship bits across mobile data channels.

It failed in at least two ways. Firstly there was no easy or automated way to downscale and compress an existing website (even a truly basic text-only one) to be displayable on a WAP screen, so website designers were faced with having to design and maintain both the normal website and the WAP-readable versions.

Secondly, we got 2.5/3G and cheap data deals which did away with the need to make every bit count.

Thirdly, phones got higher resolution colour LCDs so the need to struggle with a grey scale 320x200 WAP presentation window disappeared.

The extinction of WAP was truly deserved.

[knobtwiddler]

I wonder if any members here came across IBM's "Magnabelt"?

https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/ibm_magnabelt_224.html

As a 10-yr old, on a visit to the USA, I was given a machine. My stepfather was meeting with an electronics maker, about the prospect of suing a large telecoms conglomerate (about 5 years later, he succeeded - proving that the firm had run a Freddie Laker / BA-style operation against the now-bust, challenger firm).

As a 10yr old, I got to marvel at the R+D labs, full to the brim with the latest Tek mainframes and the like. Before the serious business of discussing the lawsuit, a 'broken' Magnabelt machine was given to me as a means of entertainment, along with a battery and pack of tapes. After a bit of tinkering, it sprang to life and I found it recorded quite well.

After a successful meeting, the family shook hands with the board and started to say goodbyes, whereupon one of them remarked something along the lines of "what if the kid recorded our discussion?". Much head scratching ensued, checking the machine to ensure that I hadn't recorded anything that I ought not have.

[cmjones01]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

The extinction of WAP was truly deserved.

I was working in the fledgling mobile applications industry at the time and WAP was such an obviously awful idea that had so much effort put in to it, with every part of the Web reinvented and "optimised" in ridiculous ways. It gave rise to the "W syndrome" where everything seemingly had to be completely made anew for "Wireless". By the time it appeared we'd already invented our own bare-minimum way of presenting Internet data on impoverished devices which worked well enough without reinventing the wheel, and within a year or so phones already had colour screens and could run something pretty close to a normal Web browser.

The current streaming revolution seems to have avoided this by adding another layer of abstraction in the "App". I can watch Netflix or YouTube on my Windows PC, Android phone, or some random cheap TV from Currys whose operating system I have no idea about. It all works well enough, and that's the way it should be. As the viewer, I don't perceive a format war, which is great.

Chris

[wd40addict]

I think part of the problem was that WAP was oversold as 'mobile internet' when it was really more like mobile Sinclair Spectrum!

I had a Nokia that could do it, but it was basically slow and useless.

[Richard_FM]

I remember Amstrad launched a landline phone in 2000 with a web browser built in, but it was almost half a decade behind the curve of technology, & if not set up right would run up a big phone bill by staying connected to the customer's email inbox!

[emeritus]

The videophone. Circa 1990, GEC were offering them to employees in pairs at a knockdown price. I have the empty case and handset of one that was kicking around our office after having been used to assist the making of a registered design application. I brought it home for the kids to play with.

[Welsh Anorak]

Another Kodak first was the disc camera. Oh dear - the results were truly dreadful. I bought one for my mother as a present - even she thought it was poor.

Eventually after many complaints you sent the camera back to Kodak and they replaced it with an ordinary camera.

[Gulliver]

Originally Posted by wd40addict

I think part of the problem was that WAP was oversold as 'mobile internet' when it was really more like mobile Sinclair Spectrum!

I had a Nokia that could do it, but it was basically slow and useless.

I had a Nokia 3330 with WAP and the best it could do was slowly access my Hotmail account....and rather more rapidly deplete my mobile credit! Technically it might have been "mobile internet".

My internet-enabled Sinclair Spectrum can actually do more.....though it cannot directly access Hotmail/Outlook.

Looking back to ancient film formats, my 1899 Folding Pocket Kodak was made for 116 film but a simple adapter allows it to use readily available 120 film. One can even fashion an adapter from a rawl plug, though a manufactured one is available quite cheaply. And curiously, the aspect ratio of the photos this camera takes matches that of most smartphone photos!

There are lots of "hacks" to enable owners to use cameras for which there's not even a cottage industry of hand-rolled film. The exception is APS, which is hampered by the very thing that was supposed to be it's USP....that cassette.

Kodak engineers did indeed invent the digital camera in the mid 1970s, storing a photo on a cassette tape. Low res but proof of concept. Managers either didn't understand what they were seeing or were intent on burying it lest it damage their film sales. Later on, Kodak developed some of the best digital sensors for cameras but entered the market too late and with a reputation for less serious cameras that hampered them in gaining any kind of market share. They spent a lot of money on branding inkjet printers too thinking people would print their digital photos, and having a Kodak printer and Kodak inks would be attractive. But of course people emailed digital photos, or posted them to the web...or very soon after social media. Kodak as we knew it collapsed and there were lots of legal agreements concerning pension schemes, jobs and debts which affect the company to this day. FujiFilm, on the other hand, diversified into cosmetics and manufacture of a "film" which is found in almost every LCD display on the planet. But ended up not manufacturing much camera film outside of Instax.

[G6Tanuki]

After WAP was a failure and proper Internet access on mobiles with non-letterbox-and-Lego-blocks screens happened, quite a few mobile operators implemented a "walled garden" where your browser always opened to show their landing page and you could then only navigate to a rather restricted range of pages whose operators had contracts with your mobile provider.

This was understandably as popular with paying customers as a bowl of fetid dingo's kidneys and didn't last long.

[Graham G3ZVT]

When my company finally issued me with a proper smartphone (after having a locked - down Raspberry), the first thing I noticed was the brilliantly clever way the image rotated to match the orientation of the screen.

Unbelievably, the first thing the youngers do is disable this feature, because everything this Tic-Toc generation film, photograph or view is now going to be 9:16 (if not taller portrait aspect ratios).
We see the fallout from this on the nightly news on our landscape oriented TV sets displaying pathetic pillar boxed images of important news items to which the broadcasters feel the necessity to add distracting "fills" to the otherwise blank areas.
I think salvation is maybe the horizon however, some manufacturers are making phones that fold out into a big square(ish) screen, I'm hoping these will take over and the vertical-video nightmare will end.

[Graham G3ZVT]

Regarding film formats, I don't think anyone has mentioned half-frame 35mm.
I fondly remember my Minolta. Over 80 exposures on a cassette if you loaded it yourself from bulk stock.

[emeritus]

Originally Posted by Graham G3ZVT

When my company finally issued me with a proper smartphone (after having a locked - down Raspberry), the first thing I noticed was the brilliantly clever way the image rotated to match the orientation of the screen.

Unbelievably, the first thing the youngers do is disable this feature, because everything this Tic-Toc generation film, photograph or view is now going to be 9:16 (if not taller portrait aspect ratios).
We see the fallout from this on the nightly news on our landscape oriented TV sets displaying pathetic pillar boxed images of important news items to which the broadcasters feel the necessity to add distracting "fills" to the otherwise blank areas.
I think salvation is maybe the horizon however, some manufacturers are making phones that fold out into a big square(ish) screen, I'm hoping these will take over and the vertical-video nightmare will end.

It looks as though the film "2001" foreshadowed this trend, as the simulated video monitor seen in the film on which the astronaut is seen watching BBC TV, is in portrait format.

[Gulliver]

Originally Posted by Graham G3ZVT

Unbelievably, the first thing the youngers do is disable this feature, because everything this Tic-Toc generation film, photograph or view is now going to be 9:16 (if not taller portrait aspect ratios).

Make video landscape again!

This is part of the reason why the brand new Pentax 17 35mm film camera was half frame, with portrait orientation being the standard way of using it with the camera held in the usual manner. The half frame format very much lives on.

[G6Tanuki]

Personally, I like portrait mode. Particularly for working with text.

In the past when I was working, I spent a lot of time using swivelable monitors that could be used in portrait mode. Much more natural, when you remember that a few millennia of writing has led to things like A4 paper and the portrait format for newspapers etc.

Fascinating that the BlackBerry was mentioned upthread, another thing that had its moment of fame but is nowhere these days. 15 years ago the BB Messenger service was really popular as a better replacement for SMS.

[emeritus]

And before the Blackberry there was the PDA, Personal Digital Assistant, principally the Palm Pilot, for doing things that you can now do with your smart phone.
When I started learning Italian a decade or so ago, one of the dialogue passages in our course book (evidently in need of revision!) involved a man who had lost his "palmare" , which contained all his important information. I explained to the younger members of the class, who didn't know about PDAs, that he was almost certainly refering to his ( Palm Pilot ) PDA, for which Italian had coined the world "Palmare".

[G6Tanuki]

Ah yes, the PDA - the electronic successor to that ubiquitous 80s accessory the Filofax.

I had a Psion Organiser!

[Bazz4CQJ]

I had a Filofax for a while (early 90's) and thought it very useful. In the 1990's, Lotus Smartsuite (there's another "format war") included an app in the package which they called "Organiser" but was actually a Filofax laid out on screen for your PC. I used it a lot, but there were problems cutting and pasting in to it, so abandoned it. Wish there was some equivalent contemporary app for current Windows, but I don't know of anything.

B

[TonyDuell]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

Ah yes, the PDA - the electronic successor to that ubiquitous 80s accessory the Filofax.

I had a Psion Organiser!

I _have_ several Psion Organisers. But then I do collect/restore vintage computers and calculators.

I also use -- a lot -- an HP95LX. It has one feature that (to the best of my knowledge) no smartphone has. An RS232 port. Meaning I can use it as a terminal or to grab data from one of my machines (and then transfer that data to another machine). Many times the 95LX has acted as the system console terminal for something I'm working on.

I also remember a very badly thought-out review of PDAs in Personal Computer World magazine. For some unknown reason they included the HP48SX calculator. Yes, you can set appointment alarms on that machine. You can store text. But as they pointed out it's not convenient. What they skipped over was that the HP48SX is also a very powerful programmable scientific calculator which handles complex numbers, vectors, matrices, symbollic manipulations and so on. At the time, if you needed something like that there was no alternative (and to be fair, it's extremely convenient for such use).

Actually, given the title of this thread, have we mentioned the Reverse Polish Notation .vs. 'algebraic' calculators yet?

[G6Tanuki]

The likes of Lotus SmartSuite and Borland Sidekick were a bit of a (non portable) revelation in the 80s and early 90s. I had my customer/supplier database on a DOS PC and you could do things like printing a single address label with a few key presses. Best of all was - with a modem connected to the RS232 port, you could highlight a phone number for a customer and the modem would dial it, then you picked up the handset when the other person answered.

Seems such a simple thing these days but back then it felt like a massive productivity enhancer.

I also remember a comms-link accessory add on for the Psion that allowed it to connect to a RS232 port, and you could then send/receive system configs to and from equipment, rather than having to go through the entire manual setup process when installing or upgrading a PAD, multiplexer or similar.