Don’t regret ‘mistakes’ like Betamax and VIC-20
I’d like to reassure Thomas Moyes that his “tale of tech woe” (Letters, Issue 570) in buying unpopular gadgets doesn’t mean he made mistakes when purchasing them.
He said he regrets buying a Betamax max video recorder, but it was actually superior to VHS because it showed pictures at 250 lines (more than the latter’s 240), and had better sound quality. VHS only won because it was cheaper. Even now, four decades on, you’ll find video enthusiasts bitter that VHS won this war.
Similarly, he shouldn’t be so negative about the VIC-20 (pictured), which at one point in the early 1980s was the world’s best-selling computer, and had some great games, like Key Quest and Demon Attack. Perhaps he merely bought it too late, and should have waited for the Commodore 64, which was always going to be more powerful because it had much more memory.
He also shouldn’t be embarrassed about owning either the Blackberry or Lumia phones. I don’t know when he bought his Blackberry, but remember that when Barack
Obama got elected in 2008 he was famously a Blackberry user. Many millions of people must have thought that if it was good enough for the leader of the free world, it would be fine for them. Alas, it wasn’t to be.
I do think, though, that the physical keyboard will make a comeback eventually. Typing on a Blackberry was always easier than on a touchscreen iphone.
As for the Lumia, again Thomas shouldn’t feel bad. It was a brilliant phone sadly let down by Microsoft’s apathy towards its mobile operating system. My final thought: as in popular culture (films, music, TV shows), the best isn’t always the most popular. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be a tech pioneer!