The SONY format is what was used in most TV production studios, News facilities, etc, for decades. VHS was popular for home use and studios even had machines for translating from BETA to the VHS. VHS was popular because it was cheaper. There was never any question as to what was better.

'C' was found to be "sexy" because it was said it would let the programmer do what he wanted without getting its tits in the way.

For years, however, the "standard" HLL on microcomputers, admittedly BEFORE the PC, was Pascal. 'C' was available in several versions for CP/M, but, probably due to the lack of an ANSI standard, a couple of pretty serious versions of PASCAL were the language of choice. We had ALGOL, PL/1, COBOL, Fortran, LISP, FORTH, and a number of others, but the real economic contest was between the widely accepted PASCAL, and various 'C' dialects that were increasing in popularity. After a time, 'C' was available in several dialects, the most popular of which was the smallest and lightest, with the fewest ANSI-like features, but that was pretty late in the game.

That was before the PC, however.

RE