Word: betamax
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Yale is part of a great family of second-bests--of institutions that almost tasted the fruits of glory but came up just short. Yale is the Salieri to our Mozart, the American Basketball Association to our National Basketball Association, the Betamax to our VHS. Yale is much like the now deceased Soviet Union--a place that had lots of tanks and other superficial signs of strength, but that, on the inside, was really a rotting carcass of mediocrity...
...your old record player. It's probably somewhere down there in the basement behind your broken-down Betamax, a Rubik's Cube or two, and a vinyl copy of Synchronicity. Cue up a record, and let it play. Congratulations--you're a musician. There may even be a spot for you on the rap-rock Family Values Tour...
With so many formats to choose among, is a VHS vs. Betamax-type standards war brewing? Could be. Some electronics companies are lining up behind one or another product, although many say they will probably sell them all. Other standard setters, such as Panasonic, don't sell any in the U.S. yet. For any recording scheme to go mainstream, it will have to get even cheaper and simpler, according to Chris Muratore, an analyst at Soundata, Inc., a market-research firm based in Hartsdale, N.Y. But there's clearly an appetite for recordable-music formats. According to Muratore's research...
...sorry fate? You'll want to weigh two crucial questions. One: Is the gadget digital? In short order, virtually all data will be rendered in computer language to move fluently through the Net's electronic sprawl. Analog phones and plain-film cameras will be about as worthwhile tomorrow as Betamax movies are in our VHS world today. To be sure, you'll still pay extra to go digital: ordinary Canon cameras, with their quaint loadable film, run from $200 bargains on up the price scale, while the digital Canon Sureshot costs $699 at New York City's 47th Street Photo...
...other important product battle is over the digital versatile disc (also known as the digital videodisc). DVD is being advertised as the answer to the CD, the videotape and the CD-ROM. DVD is also the focus of the biggest battle to create an international standard since vhs vs. Betamax (in which Idei was on the losing side). Sony and Philips had been working for years to come up with a video version of the CD that would replace videotape cassettes and take CD-ROM discs to a new level. But in 1993 Toshiba trumped Sony, at least...