Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!emory!gatech!ncsuvx!news From: kdarling@hobbes.ncsu.edu (Kevin Darling) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Commodore and "standards" Message-ID: <1990Dec13.132631.18739@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu> Date: 13 Dec 90 13:26:31 GMT References: <90346.222925JKT100@psuvm.psu.edu> Sender: news@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu (USENET News System) Organization: NCSU Computing Center Lines: 49 JKT100@psuvm.psu.edu (JKT) writes: > Anyone else notice that this isn't the first time Commodore has > adopted an impending "standard" only to be screwed when nobody > else adopted it? It sure happened with the IFF "standard"... > :-( Kurt Greetings. You hit on one of my favorite topics (standards). In this case, I don't think they got "screwed". It was a good idea to adopt any standardized interchange format. Didn't have to be IFF; could've been something totally different. As long as there was a publicly available definition, that's all that counted. [ We've adopted IFF for our new 68K/OS-9 machines. Again, not because it's anything truly special, but because it was easier than reinventing the wheel ;-) and we think it's important to have as many preordained standards as possible; it helps development efforts. And altho we'll be using CD-I and Apple style chunks for most things (many of the chunks Amigans are familiar with, are optimized for Amiga use, y'see), the coming public availability of the formats will allow people to write conversion programs (we already convert and play Amiga ANIMs and sounds, for example)... to the benefit of all sides. Just as people do with various sound and GIF files now.] But again, it doesn't matter what the format is. The key is "publicly availability". Without that, you have no useful standard (here's where I go into high gear on two favorite subtopics ;-) ... Hypercard: Apple went so far as to legally protect the bitmap encoding. Dumb. Dumb. As a result, other platforms and programs use something else. Result: the user loses, due to not being able to share work/data. Future result: someone will eventually come up with a publicly useable "hyper" format, and it'll be adopted by everyone else. Apple misses another chance to become the standard-maker. No "vision", just lawyers ;-). Amiga ANIMs type J: That's the secret encoding in Sculpt/Animate 3D files. While I have nothing against programs that have their own formats, any ANIMs _posted_ should be in a public format (in this case, ANIM 5). It totally defeats the purpose of IFF to post data that can't be used in other programs. Back to the main topic: CBM made an okay choice. What else would you have them pick? There wasn't much else at the time, anyway . Mac PICT format? Some old IBM format? Nah. best - kev PS: If I had to bet, I'd guess that the IBM/Microsoft RIFF format will become the dominant future standard for exchanging multimedia files, at least. The ANSI formats are (as usual) taking too long in creation (altho we made sure we had people on the committee :-).