A t the tail end of August, a brief obituary ran in business pages around the world: The Betamax VCR format was dead. Sony had just announced that it would stop manufacturing its Betamax video-recording machines by year's end and concentrate instead on DVD and other new technologies.
The big surprise here was not the disclosure that Betamax was about to breathe its last; it was the revelation that the quintessentially '70s and '80s technology was still alive. Who would have thought it? Didn't it lose the war way back in 1988, when Sony, in a tacit admission that Beta's rival format had cornered the market, first started making VHS recorders? In some ways, the company's latest statement is on a par with the zany announcement by the South Australian state government on Aug. 16 that World War II was officially over. People, we'd heard that already.
But there's always more to a story than you think. In the South Australian case, the official declaration was required to overturn a wartime emergency powers act that gave the state government sweeping, and by now illegal, authority to search, arrest, impose rationing and so on. In the excitement of 1945, apparently, they forgot to revoke it.