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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
MIDI.
Before the 80's, there was no standard interface to control electronic instruments, just a bunch of proprietary interfaces unique to each manufacterer. But in 1983, amazingly they actually standardized on MIDI, and it remains a useful standard to this day, with any new versions of MIDI being completely backwards compatible, so your Yamaha DX7 from the 80's is still just as viable to use today as the day it was new!
DMX is a similar protocol for lighting.
Sure, there's artnet and sacn, but most gigs still use good old DMX.
I hate to tell you this but DMX passed away in 2021
This really is a perfect example. I did a lot of MIDI things as a kid!
Should mention Open Sound Control which is also pretty good. Not exactly a competitor, it was supposed to provide a richer, real time interface. Still popular for certain use cases, including beyond music.
Surprised I haven't seen anyone here mention unicode
Probably because utf-8 vs utf-16 vs utf-32 makes people feel like it is still annoying multi-standard.
There are many, I think. Like what other people have mentioned, sometimes the new standard is just better on all metrics.
Another common example is when someone creates something as a passion project, rather than expecting it to get used widely. It's especially frustrating for me when I see people denigrate projects like those, criticizing it for a lack of practicality...
The competing standards problem is mostly a problem of not actually talking to stakeholders. Most of these "universal standards" don't cover some rare, specific, but very important, use cases.
Light bulb sockets are the same all over. RJ-45 Ethernet, USB-C, Bluetooth, WiFi, TCP, HTTP, HTML, CSS.
While light bulb sockets don't change much from region to region, they definitely aren't all the same. For the bulbs (not the bars), there's two large categories: Edison screws and bi-pin. Edison screws also come in a lot of sizes. When compact fluorescents were rolling out, they got a new bi-pin connector from the USA: GU24. My whole home has GU24 fixtures (not by my own choice), but my lamps are Edison screws.
Thank you for teaching me how to replace my porch light (ONLY MY PORCH LIGHT?!?!) that's been out for over a year. I tried to pull the bulb out and it shattered in my hands. I was like WTF is this shit? Haven't touched it since.
GU24 is wack, especially for home lighting. I think they aren't made much anymore.
It was a pain to find gu24, I had to order them online for two rooms
Include car cigarette lighter power ports
USB-C
Gonna have to disagree with you there. Try using a USB-C data cable to charge a device. Now try figuring out which cable out of five is the charge cable.
Those aren't different standards, they're just different USB-C cables. It's like saying light bulb sockets aren't a unifying standard because there's different bulbs with different wattages. The fact that all those cables work over the same standard is an example of how ubiquitous the standard is. That said they should be labeled better, like how USB3 was color coded blue; each cable could have a color strip to distinguish it.
Whenever the new standard hits the almost impossible golden triangle of "cheap, reliable, and fast".
It's gotta be cheaper than the alternatives, better and more reliable than the alternatives, and faster/easier to adopt than the alternatives.
Early computers for example had various ways to chug math, such as mechanical setups, relays, vacuum tube's, etc.
When Bell invented their MOSFET transistor and figured out how to scale production, all those previous methods became obsolete for computers because transistors were now cheaper, more reliable, and faster to adopt than their predecessors.
Tbf though transistors are more of a hardware thing. A better example of a standard would be RIP being superceded by BGP on the internet.
Tbf though transistors are more of a hardware thing. A better example of a standard would be RIP being superceded by BGP on the internet.
another big example is the telecom companies being superseded by IP based networking, rather than whatever patch routing bullshit was previously cooked up.
Sometimes certain solutions are just, better.
Toilet paper rolls.
Somehow we settled on a pretty good size for toilet rolls, and there never seems to be a compatibility issue with holders.
At least not for households. Commercial products have their own things going on, but it doesn't affect most people.
Is there a formal standard, or did we decide not to mess with good enough?
We've got a 100 year old toilet roll holder, the spindle was turned on a lathe and the wooden cutout it sits in was hand carved. It is a poor fit for modern high sheet count rolls. We can't stand to get rid of it so we just leave the roll outside of it until it is small enough to fit.
Standards committees: We don't discriminate. Everyone can have their own standard.
Email, as far as im aware there isn't some alternative email standard (messaging services, whatsapp, signal, sms, etc do not count imo as I believe they serve a different purpose than email)
DNS, while there are alternative root servers, they still fundamentally rely on the dns protocol.
TCP/IP, when the internet was first starting, this was not the only standard in use, but now it is (to my knowledge).
I thought about this for longer than I should've for a comment on a random post, but this is all I could think of lol.
edit: grammar
TCP/IP isnt the only standard in use even today. UDP/IP is the other big one and there's a few smaller protocols hanging around like utp.
Ah, I shouldve been more clear. I didnt just mean tcp specifically, I meant IP as a whole, for an example of a competing standard see x.25.
Funny enough, that wikipedia article mentions that x.25 is still in use by the aviation industry, and after a quick search it seems it is! So I guess Im still wrong lol.
You can avoid the issue when a government just mandates one standard, ideally after consulting with experts on which is the best.
See: USB, SCART, etc.
A lot of people seem to be opposed to this argument, seeing it as a kind of government overreach, but I think it can work if done correctly. Things like USB and HDMI are already governed by collectives of companies, I think having the government work together with them can be beneficial for both consumers and producers alike.
Networking standards started picking winners during the PC revolution of the 80's and 90's. Ethernet, with the first standards announced in 1983, ended up beating out pretty much other LAN standard at the physical layer (physical plugs, voltages and other ways of indicating signals) and the data link layer (the structure of a MAC address or an Ethernet frame). And this series of standards been improved many times over, with meta standards about how to deal with so many generations of standards through autonegotiation and backwards compatibility.
We generally expect Ethernet to just work, at the highest speeds the hardware is capable of supporting.
USB has worked pretty well IMO
Yeah just don’t pay too close attention to the unofficial power delivery protocols.
or the cursed double ended USB-A cables
My main complaint about USB is the cables. There’s no way of knowing what standards and data speeds the cable may support.
Not exactly this, but it reminds me of my first job. I used to work in finance, and I was given the task of automating cash flow reports that were sent out to hundreds of clients.
The problem was that they were made manually in Excel, and most of them were unique. So every couple years they'd get a bunch of smart people in a conference room, and tell them to figure out how to automate the cash flows. The first step was always to create a standard cash flow template, and convince everyone to adopt it.
Some users would adopt the new template, but most of them would say that the client didn't like it, so they'd stop using it and the project would fall apart.
By the time I got there, there were still hundreds of unique cash flows, but then there were a few dozen that shared the same handful of templates, like a graveyard of failed attempts to automate this process.
I just made the output customizable. The reports looked the same as what the client was used to, but it saved hundreds of man hours for the users. A lot of people got laid off.
The way I see it, it's not so much an issue of making something that's better than the other standards. It's really about getting your standard into actual use and hitting critical mass which makes all the other standards irrelevant.
When the standard is a big interoperability push that leverages MORE functionality as a bribe to be implemented.
This is how USB (plug & play!), Bluetooth (wireless headset!), HDMI (high def, single cable!) , and USB-C (both sides are good!) all beat the entrenched pseudo standards.
There are a lot and in most cases you'll notice when dealing with Americans, who are refusing to do stuff like the rest of the world. The meter and kilogram took over from hundreds of different measurement standards. Most of the world is using the same calendar and writes dates in the same way. Most countries are driving on the same side. Traffic signs are kind of the same worldwide. You can buy screws with the same standard everywhere.
