Article reads like Sony started using the i-Link name before iMac was released, is this accurate ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394
It looks like it was about the same time
How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
41–50 of 102 posts
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#42It really is a shame that FireWire didn't work out. Aside from the far better transfer speeds, when used for external storage FireWire has always been more solid. USB storage has a nasty habit of periodically flickering out for a split second and has generally been more flaky, something that's actually gotten worse with USB 3 — if you haven't run into this set of issues yourself, do a quick Google and you'll find mou…
On the other hand, malware would have hit commodity devices much faster. That DMA is begging to be used to root a computer.
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#43It really is a shame that FireWire didn't work out. Aside from the far better transfer speeds, when used for external storage FireWire has always been more solid. USB storage has a nasty habit of periodically flickering out for a split second and has generally been more flaky, something that's actually gotten worse with USB 3 — if you haven't run into this set of issues yourself, do a quick Google and you'll find mou…
On the other hand, malware would have hit commodity devices much faster. That DMA is begging to be used to root a computer.
So now we've got thunderbolt.
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#44It really is a shame that FireWire didn't work out. Aside from the far better transfer speeds, when used for external storage FireWire has always been more solid. USB storage has a nasty habit of periodically flickering out for a split second and has generally been more flaky, something that's actually gotten worse with USB 3 — if you haven't run into this set of issues yourself, do a quick Google and you'll find mou…
On the other hand, malware would have hit commodity devices much faster. That DMA is begging to be used to root a computer.
In that time period, most laptops had one or two PCMCIA/PC Card/CardBus slots that had the same vulnerability.
They were commonly used back then to add modems, network adapters and even hard drives.
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#45Great article - unbelievable really. Is USB-C by all measures now superior to FireWire? Or are we still paying for Jobs' mistake?
USB-C is just a connector. Some of the devices using that connector only support USB 2.0 signaling over that connector, so USB-C does not imply complete superiority over FireWire.
Do you have an example of a device that only uses USB 2.0 over a USB-C connector? I wasn't aware of such a thing.
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
FireWire? That would have been a good addition to the article. Hopefully that will allow older FireWire devices to be used with a USB-C-to-Firewire adapter.
A cursory google search did not reveal any USB-C to FireWire adapters; there are Thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapters (Thunderbolt 3 is basically USB-C version of Thunderbolt 2 which is Mini DisplayPort) and there are Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire adapters, so that combo may work
Using a TB3 -> TB2 adapter and a TB2 -> FW800 adapter definitely works on Apple hardware with every FireWire device I've tested (hard drives, cameras, and audio gear)
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
USB-C is just a connector. Some of the devices using that connector only support USB 2.0 signaling over that connector, so USB-C does not imply complete superiority over FireWire.
Do you have an example of a device that only uses USB 2.0 over a USB-C connector? I wasn't aware of such a thing.
All phones with type c
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
USB-C is just a connector. Some of the devices using that connector only support USB 2.0 signaling over that connector, so USB-C does not imply complete superiority over FireWire.
Do you have an example of a device that only uses USB 2.0 over a USB-C connector? I wasn't aware of such a thing.
Some smartphones.
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#49> After being informed of IBM's hundreds of millions in yearly patent revenue, CEO Steve Jobs authorized a change in FireWire's licensing policy. Apple would now charge a fee of $1 per port. (So if a device has two ports, that's $2 per unit.)...Intel sent its CTO to talk to Jobs about the change, but the meeting went badly. Intel decided to withdraw its support for FireWire—to pull the plug on efforts to build FireWi…
I can't help but laugh at how much of a euphemism " ... but the meeting went badly." must be.
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I understand. Are you replacing hardware for clients who think they need low-latency realtime delivery of data, or for clients who actually need to hit low-latency delivery deadlines? From the article: > And FireWire had its own micro-controller, so it was unaffected by fluctuations in CPU load. This is still an important distinction for, say, an USB soundcard vs. a Firewire soundcard.
They need to get data in like... 3 seconds... So the operators can shut the machine down if something goes wrong. But now the machine has much more intelligence, so it shuts itself off quicker. And where they needed to check the "low latency" and "realtime" boxes in the 90s to get adequate performance, now any bus (like Ethernet, or you can stick Ethercat or Powerlink on top if you need realtime) is so much faster th…
This reminds me of cable internet vs DSL. I was such a DSL partisan. Cable's bullshit, you're sharing speeds with your whole neighborhood, no guaranteed bandwidth, yadda yadda yadda.
But at the end of the day, cable internet ended up being so damn fast it didn't matter. DSL providers couldn't bump the speed fast enough, telcos have to run FTTH to compete with cable, the infrastructure takes too long to arrive, and even with guaranteed bandwidth to the CO, your uplink will be oversubscribed anyway.
I type on gigabit xfinity docsis3.1 that speedtests at 250Mbps.....