Technology history is littered with dead media formats that didn’t survive the natural selection process. HD DVD is just one of them, according to Steve Guttenberg’s Blog at C|Net on Tuesday.

With the Blu-ray/GD DVD high-definition disc war over, it’s interesting to look back at the history of various storage formats that didn’t make it. Some were the folly of the supporters and some just didn’t stand up to the consumer marketplace. The Beta tape format vs. VHS was one of the most notable battles, but there were others.

"Some formats wither and die on their own -- the Laserdisc wasn’t competing against anything but a lack of interest. The LD was a 12-inch optical analog disc alternative to Beta and VHS. It looked like an LP-size CD. Yes, it was a better, higher-quality format than tape, and it still garnered only a small yet fanatical market base among videophiles," Mr. Guttenberg noted.

It may have been that customers were happy with tape at the time, something that had the advantage of being recordable. Even so, Laserdisc fared better than RCA’s fiasco with CED. "Marketed as ’SelectaVision,’ the grooved, LP-like discs were fragile, and they never stood a chance against VHS tape," the author noted. "Still, RCA stuck to its guns for five long years before snuffing the CED in 1986. Ten years later, the Laserdisc was on its last legs when the DVD finally killed it off -- the software, that is. Pioneer still sells new DVD-LD players. How’s that for customer support?"

Other formats were also discussed in an interesting retrospective. Soon, observers will start writing about what Toshiba did wrong with HD DVD. The failures and successes of these formats is endlessly instructive and entertaining from a business standpoint.