Macworld:
FireWire is emblematic of everything that’s great about Apple as well as everything that’s not, and of a particular mindset among some Apple users.
It was technically hugely sophisticated, removing much of the burden for the data interchange from the main CPU; unlike USB, which required a host computer, FireWire was essentially a peer-to-peer networking technology, and it could transfer at full speed in both directions simultaneously, unlike USB.
But it was also, ultimately, expensive to implement, and although variants were supported by other companies (notably Sony), it struggled to get traction outside of the Apple ecosystem.
I have a soft spot for FireWire (I took delivery of the very first FireWire Drive in Canada). For those of us who remember not only the days of slow USB 1 but also back to ADB and (shudder) SCSI, it was a great way to move lots of data extremely quickly. I still have a bunch of FireWire cables I don’t have the heart to throw out.
Perhaps if they had had a favorable license for the patent fir wire may have had broader implications. I still remember fondly using my first firewire drive and laughing, knowing I wouldn’t configure SCSI anymore.
Agreed. A small part in the demise of FireWire has to be Apple’s early insistence on charging (fairly) exorbitant licensing fees for it.
More expensive, but what’s your time worth? I regularly downloaded all the, RAW, images from a UDMA CF card in a regular FireWire reader faster than the JPG versions of the same shoot from a SD card in a MBP built-in slot. Using a FW800 reader and cable was significantly faster than FW400.
Nothing to do with my time and everything to do with how much Apple was charging other vendors to include FireWire in their products.
Out of curiosity, how did you confirm that you were the first in Canada to take delivery on a FireWire drive?
Implementation of IEEE 1394 [10] is said to require use of 261 issued international patents[11] held by 10[12] corporations. Use of these patents requires licensing; use without license generally constitutes patent infringement.[13] Companies holding IEEE 1394 IP formed a license administrator (“patent pool“) MPEG LA, LLC, to whom they licensed patents. MPEG LA sublicenses these patents to providers of equipment implementing IEEE 1394. Under the typical patent pool license, a royalty of US$0.25 per unit is payable by the manufacturer upon the manufacture of each 1394 finished product;[13] no royalties are payable by users.
The copy paste from Wikipedia
should inform the author that
It wasn’t just Apple that had the patents.
Texas Instrument was also sole supplier of the chip as well or something like that.
The only company shipping the drives into Canada at the time was La Cie. They told me I was the first person to get one in Canada.
Firewire worked faster and better than anything that had come before it. It was the promise of peripheral connections without pain, made real.
The magazines had described how it would work far more efficiently than resource-hogging, brain-dead USB 1. Zero configuration, zero management. The despicable, time-wasting SCSI was dead, and Apple had helped kill it. It was a great year for cleaning out the spare-cable box.
I remember accompanying my younger cousin to shop for his first Mac at J&R in NYC. The rep was showing off a LaCie portable hard drive, running Quicktime video off it. Then he pulled the cable. The video froze. He plugged it in again. It resumed gracefully.
Done. Why would I have settled for anything else?
FireWire has been superseded by Thunderbolt, especially for fast data transfer between machines. I managed to exchange 4GB files from on machine to another in less then 5 second using a thunderbolt cable 😉