In my opinion, Betamax was actually superior to VHS but VHS cornered the market through ubiquity and cost. I was reminded of this because today is the 40th anniversary of ethernet. It has evolved from its modest beginnings as a 2.94 Mbps CSMA/CD system connecting a hundred or so workstations to higher speeds including gigabit ethernet with hundreds of connections. It is also my opinion that back in the day token-ring was a superior technology. But IBM, in its infinite wisdom, made it so bloody expensive and difficult to implement that ethernet won by default. Makes me think of OS/2 which was a really good desktop and server OS. They could have given Microsoft a run for the desktop market but failed to do so. I once got OS/2 to run on a 386 laptop with 4Mb of RAM. It ran. Dog slow, but it ran. And I could do things on OS/2 which would routinely cause Windows to crash.
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