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How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

arstechnica.com

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Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#61

Post by ukyrgf »

dcosson wrote: post #19

One major thing not mentioned is that apprently not everyone bothered implementing FireWire the same. I never learned the technical reason, but if you bought certain digital audio recording interfaces circa 2007, you learned in the fine print/after you called customer service that it only worked with TI FireWire ports . These were the ones used on Macs at this point, I had a dell laptop which used a cheaper manufactu…

I don't miss those days at all. I chose to build a fairly expensive setup ~10 years ago that is now completely obsolete. I'd have to build a 32-bit Windows XP machine to get it to even work. It got replaced by maybe $400 in USB devices and they'll power up on any computer I plug it into.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#63

Post by JohnBooty »

bluedino wrote: post #5

I 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.

I still love it. =)

FW800 gets close to 80MB/sec, which is really as much as I need for my backup/archiving needs. And the daisy-chaining is just awesome.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#64

Post by lobster_johnson »

jjguy wrote: post #22

> 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…

It's also a good reminder that Jobs, for all the posthumous praise he gets, made some rather stupid business blunders during his tenures at Apple.

Apple can be aggressive about its tech today (such as Lightning and Thunderbolt; anyone know what they charge for those?), but back then they were much more of a niche player.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#65

Post by flomo »

jjguy wrote: post #22

> 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've heard it argued that burning Intel was intentional strategy as Jobs wanted Firewire to be associated with the Mac. People bought Macs simply because they couldn't get their DV cameras working with a third-party Windows-based setup.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#66

Post by gadgetoid »

pmarreck wrote: post #37
walterbell wrote: post #25

Earlier 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

I've not seen any simple adaptors, but OWC's Thunderbolt 3 dock includes a FireWire 800 port.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#68

Post by astrodust »

GeekyBear wrote: post #44
throwaway91111 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, the good old "People Can't Memorize Computer Indusry Acronyms" standard. I still have no idea what it stands for.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#70

Post by astrodust »

payne92 wrote: post #4

FireWire: the hardware interface where the designers & implementers thought offering unfettered DMA was a good idea.

At the time it was a good idea. It avoided bottlenecking everything through the CPU in an era when CPU power was extremely scarce: A 200MHz G3 chip doesn't have a lot of surplus horsepower.

Let's also hear your whines about how the C64 didn't have protected memory and the Apple ][ was so easy to hack because you could open the lid and poke around with a logic probe.

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