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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

#81

Post by LeifCarrotson »

bsder wrote: post #80
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's being compared to something like 12 Mbps USB 1.1: Firewire is just so much faster that it doesn't matter. I deal with upgrading a lot of industrial electronics, and have to answer this question frequently: people are concerned about replacing Modbus RTU and similar setups with modern protocols: "But it's not real time!", "It's too high-level!" "Consumer or office network gear can't possibly work here!" N…

You might want to look into Time Sensitive Networking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Sensitive_Networking This is a real-time standard for ethernet that lets you reserve slots for time sensitive information. It's primarily being driven by the automotive guys who want to be able to wire up 4 displays, 12 speakers, and a video player for an in-car entertainment system. Before TSN, it was AVB (audio-video bridging)…

That sounds a lot like Ethercat, honestly. And I am more in automotive industrial stuff than the protocols on the car, which - while technically standardized - are usually a bit vendor-specific.

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

#82

Post by bsder »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #81
bsder wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to look into Time Sensitive Networking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Sensitive_Networking This is a real-time standard for ethernet that lets you reserve slots for time sensitive information. It's primarily being driven by the automotive guys who want to be able to wire up 4 displays, 12 speakers, and a video player for an in-car entertainment system. Before TSN, it was AVB (audio-video bridging)…

That sounds a lot like Ethercat, honestly. And I am more in automotive industrial stuff than the protocols on the car, which - while technically standardized - are usually a bit vendor-specific.

TSN works excellently for industrial networking.

I had a nice chat with a customer rep from a big microcontroller company at a trade show where we talked about how in a couple years the 3 rows of "vendor-specific" industrial networking companies are going to be GONE.

And they don't even realize they're about to get run over.

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

#83

Post by eropple »

ukyrgf wrote: post #61
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.

Yeah - the future's pretty awesome. I can run a three-camera live studio with six microphones off a laptop these days (for Internet streaming; higher quality obviously requires a little more work).

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

#84

Post by jancsika »

bsder wrote: post #80
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's being compared to something like 12 Mbps USB 1.1: Firewire is just so much faster that it doesn't matter. I deal with upgrading a lot of industrial electronics, and have to answer this question frequently: people are concerned about replacing Modbus RTU and similar setups with modern protocols: "But it's not real time!", "It's too high-level!" "Consumer or office network gear can't possibly work here!" N…

You might want to look into Time Sensitive Networking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Sensitive_Networking This is a real-time standard for ethernet that lets you reserve slots for time sensitive information. It's primarily being driven by the automotive guys who want to be able to wire up 4 displays, 12 speakers, and a video player for an in-car entertainment system. Before TSN, it was AVB (audio-video bridging)…

Does anyone use it at the moment?

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

#85

Post by samtoday »

CydeWeys wrote: post #45
wtallis wrote: post #18

Earlier 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.

The Nokia tablet is the first that comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N1

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

#86

Post by CydeWeys »

samtoday wrote: post #85
CydeWeys wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Nokia tablet is the first that comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N1

That's over two-and-a-half years old though. The kinds of devices using USB-C that are coming out nowadays are using USB 3.1.

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

#87

Post by bsder »

jancsika wrote: post #84
bsder wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to look into Time Sensitive Networking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Sensitive_Networking This is a real-time standard for ethernet that lets you reserve slots for time sensitive information. It's primarily being driven by the automotive guys who want to be able to wire up 4 displays, 12 speakers, and a video player for an in-car entertainment system. Before TSN, it was AVB (audio-video bridging)…

Does anyone use it at the moment?

Define "anyone".

Apparently Harman-Kardon: http://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/4947-4-design-tips-avb...

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

#88

Post by Tloewald »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #64
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.

Thunderbolt is Intel AFAIK. (Correction: apparently Intel made some claims but Apple owns it.)

My guess is Intel probably would have backed USB over Firewire regardless since it had a stake in USB.

The irony is, USB would probably have failed without Apple.

The fact is that Intel has repeatedly chosen its own technology to promote, and until recently it had the market power to force everyone else to follow suit.

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

#89

Post by megablast »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #64
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.

> 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.

Did anyone say that Jobs never made any blunders? Does anyone think that there it any person alive that didn't make blunders?

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

#90

Post by devwastaken »

megablast wrote: post #89
lobster_johnson wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Did anyone say that Jobs never made any blunders? Does anyone think that there it any person alive that didn't make blunders?

No one would say 'no' to that, but at the same time people would praise jobs anyways. "See, he made firewire, which made intel make USB 2.0. He knew exactly what he was doing." etc, etc.
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