How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
arstechnica.com
How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
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Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#2I call this the "invented here" syndrome: When company management becomes so dysfunctional they don't trust anything invented at their own company unless it's been externally validated.
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#3This is an amazing story about hardware innovation, politics and some kind of bullying. I am amazed that despite all, corporations had innovation in focus, even at the cost of decreasing profit margins.
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#4FireWire: the hardware interface where the designers & implementers thought offering unfettered DMA was a good idea.
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#5I loved FireWire. I had an external HD and DVD-RW, I could daisy chain them and connect them to my Dell, Sony, and Apple machines. Faster than USB, only needed one port... everyone complained FireWire was more expensive but the devices performed so much better.
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#6I've used FireWire to connect external disks (verdict: as stable as eSATA, much better than USB2) and to pull video from a cable set-top-box (verdict: the cable box was crappy; no problems directly attributable to the FireWire connection.)
The major problem with FireWire, shared with Thunderbolt, is that it offers DMA to external devices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMA_attack
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#7FireWire: the hardware interface where the designers & implementers thought offering unfettered DMA was a good idea.
If I'm not mistaken that is also true of latter Thunderbolt.
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#8I've used FireWire to connect external disks (verdict: as stable as eSATA, much better than USB2) and to pull video from a cable set-top-box (verdict: the cable box was crappy; no problems directly attributable to the FireWire connection.) The major problem with FireWire, shared with Thunderbolt, is that it offers DMA to external devices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMA_attack
Doesn't USB-C have the same DMA problem?
Did eSATA also lose to USB? I don't think it has the DMA problem.
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#9Since we're sharing our nostalgic Firewire stories... the first video camera I ever bought (almost 20 years ago) could only connect to computers via Firewire. I remember almost all digital cameras on the market only supported it. It seemed like a clear winner.
It's interesting to see an article that explains why it died.
Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
#10Great article - unbelievable really.
Is USB-C by all measures now superior to FireWire? Or are we still paying for Jobs' mistake?