The video game industry seems to be the one standout in electronic entertainment in which incompatibility is a way of life. When you purchase a CD, you know it will work on any CD player. If you buy a cassette tape, it will work on any cassette player regardless of the brand name. But when you buy video game software, you have to make sure that it will play on your console.

Despite popular opinion, the rest of the electronic entertainment industry is not immune to incompatibility. We see it every day, and we have taken it for granted. Just look at DVDs and videocassettes, two incompatible video formats. We just don't look at it that way because a DVD can work only in a DVD player, and a videotape will fit only in a VCR. But the bottom line is that they're two very incompatible video formats. And then we can add the near dead laser disc to that list. And if you think hard enough, you might even remember the video disc that RCA released in the early '80s. The CED format was a video disc that used grooves and styluses. Very incompatible with the competing laser disc system, and also very inferior. The laser disc, at least, lasted for 20 years.

Front left to right: Mini-disc, 45 Center l-r: analog cassette, digital compact cassette, 8-track Back l-r: LP, Compact Disc

And what about videotapes? Remember Beta? When Sony decided to begin manufacturing VHS VCRs, you knew it was throwing in the towel.

Don't think that video products are the only ones that suffer from incompatibility, though. Audio components have suffered from incompatibility issues ever since Thomas Edison recorded his immortal words "Mary Had a Little Lamb" onto a tinfoil cylinder in December 1877. While Edison sold his phonograph, companies such as Columbia and Edison's own General Electric began selling the software, the individual cylinders that contained prerecorded songs. Edison controlled the market for eight years until the first noncompatible players came out in 1885. The graphophone machine from Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter played wax-coated cylinders that had vertical-cut grooves throughout. And they couldn't play on Edison's phonograph.

A third incompatible player, the gramophone, arrived in 1887. Emile Berliner's manually driven Gramophone used a nonwax disc that had a lateral-cut groove. A year later, Berliner built a Gramophone that used a flat 12-inch disc. Within a year after opening his US gramophone company in 1893, Berliner's machines competed directly against Edison's. A motor was added to the gramophone in 1896, and, in 1901, Berliner's company became the Victor Talking Machine Company.

Edison continued to compete against the Victor Company with his cylinders, but it was a losing battle. In 1913, he abandoned the cylinders, and all the folks who had bought his phonograph found themselves with a product that was no longer supported.
 

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