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How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor
- dreamcompiler 9y agoI 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.
- rconti 9y agoIt's interesting that Apple, the company famous for dropping the floppy disk drive, CD drive, ethernet port, hell, even the USB port, was afraid to ADOPT something new.
- Yellow_Boat 9y agoThis 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.
- payne92 9y agoFireWire: the hardware interface where the designers & implementers thought offering unfettered DMA was a good idea.
- qubex 9y agoIf I'm not mistaken that is also true of latter Thunderbolt.
- astrodust 9y agoAt 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.
- bluedino 9y agoI 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.
- JohnBooty 9y agoI 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.
- enjoy-your-stay 9y agoI loved Firewire too, I can still remember the jaw dropping speed (at the time) that it copied music to my iPod.
- dsr_ 9y agoI'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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMA_attack
- walterbell 9y agoDoesn't USB-C have the same DMA problem? Did eSATA also lose to USB? I don't think it has the DMA problem.
- DiabloD3 9y agoUSB-C refers to the connector, not the protocol standard. USB 3.0 is what you actually meant, since it finally added Firewire-like device-initiated DMA.
- po 9y agoThunderbolt has DMA and it's offered over USB-C so... kind of by proxy. It's not clear to me if a USB-C device doesn't support Thunderbolt (i.e. it only does the USB 3.1 part) if it also is clear of this potential issue.
- rangibaby 9y agoI think people with actual need for eSATA have moved on to PCIe SSDs. USB3 killed everything else at the low end; I remember buying an external HDD with FW800 in the olden days of 2011, then getting a USB3 drive in 2013 which is still going strong and fast (enough).
- Dylan16807 9y ago> I think people with actual need for eSATA have moved on to PCIe SSDs. People that specifically needed their drives to be both fast and external moved to internal drives? I don't understand.
- throwaway2016a 9y agoSince 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.
- NikolaeVarius 9y agoYeah, I remember this time being strange. I had bought a good bit of Firewire equipment for my Cameras and even got a PCI-E card for my PC. It just seemed to vanish without a trace. I still have those cables and accessories somewhere.
- theandrewbailey 9y agoI got one of those Lacie big disks around 2006. I loved using the Firewire 400 port rather than USB. It was at least 20% faster. It's unfortunate that I never got to use the Firewire 800 ports on it.
- edzorg 9y agoGreat article - unbelievable really. Is USB-C by all measures now superior to FireWire? Or are we still paying for Jobs' mistake?
- wtallis 9y agoUSB-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.
- walterbell 9y agoWhat protocols are commonly implemented by Intel host chipsets which support the USB-C connector, e.g. on a 2017 laptop?
- jsjohnst 9y agoThunderbolt 3, DisplayPort, USB 1.1-3.1, FireWire, HDMI, MHL, analog audio, power delivery
- walterbell 9y agoFireWire? 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.
- jancsika 9y ago> Speeds across networks of all sizes are now so high that there's also little need for something like FireWire. "The packets can arrive way before it's needed, because it's so fast," Sirkin noted. "So you don't need to worry about being synchronous any more." For use cases where reliable low-latency transport is required (i.e., Firewire's main strength), what could possibly be meant by "packets arrive way before it's needed"?
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoI 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!" No, it can. It's freaking gigabit Ethernet. You had 9600 baud before and were happy to read out a few tags a second, now we can stream multiple sensors at a multiple kilohertz each, or transfer the entire image of your old PLC in a couple packets. There was a brief time when Firewire was way faster than everything else, but it didn't keep iterating like USB did. Honestly, that's probably a more accurate reason why it died. Plus the decision to use separate connectors for 400 and 800: if they had done like USB and allowed Firewire mice at 50 Mbps to connect to the same port as 800 Mbps camcorders, and built Firewire 1600 and 3200, it might still be around.
- jancsika 9y agoI'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.
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoThey 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 that it doesn't matter. It's like someone saying they need their Enterprise-grade 15k RPM SCSI drives in their server...when they just need an ordinary consumer SATAIII SSD. Economies of scale are huge in tech. Stuff that reaches billions of people is often more performant than specialized gear.
- Grazester 9y agoI loved FireWire. It was faster in the real world than usb 2.0(this was fire 400 too and even 800) and my computer felt so responsive while transferring files. Ethernet over FireWire in the days of winxp was great also!!
- acomjean 9y agoI've used it for hardrives and video cameras (it was the standard way to get Video off a minidv tape camera). I always found it worked well. But on video I Remember the different names being bing used being confusing. And while all macs had it some pcs didn't. With USB being ubiquitous and USB 2 being good enough when it finally showed up. Somewhat oddly mac was a big pusher of USB as that's what the original iMac used. Had intel put it in its chipsets...
- dcosson 9y agoOne 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 manufacturer so (perhaps combined with the fact that my recording interface itself was not a high end one and maybe cut some corners on its end too) the audio recording quality was staticy and uneven. I ended up having to return it and get a lower-bandwidth, noticeably higher latency USB powered one because at least USB ports were consistent. I was always curious if some manufacturers were not implementing the full spec here (maybe because by this time according to the article FireWire was already on its last legs), or if this was due to flaws in the spec that left certain things optional or something and that ruined interoperability.
- Dylan16807 9y agoThe more things change... Note the recent problems where the Macbook Pro refuses to use Thunderbolt 3 devices with a TPS65982 chipset, and requires TI's TPS65983 chipset.
- NSAID 9y agoWow, I had forgotten about that. I never understood what the cause of this issue was either, but it sure took up a lot of my time.
- wtallis 9y agoIt shouldn't really surprise anyone that a cheaper VIA host interface chip would have worse performance or compatibility than a more expensive TI or Agere/LSI chip. The VIA chips were sufficient for connecting an external hard drive, and that made them sufficient for checking a box on the laptop's spec sheet. You didn't run into trouble with USB because by that time all your USB ports were coming straight from the Intel southbridge. Even if Intel's host controller implementation had issues, it would have been the device maker's problem to work around them since Intel's market share was so large. No modern peripheral interconnect is simple enough for host interfaces to be judged on a mere pass/fail basis. The cheap chips almost always find a way to suck, whether it's obscure like FireWire or ubiquitous like gigabit Ethernet.
- jjguy 9y ago> 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 FireWire into its chipsets—and instead throw its weight behind USB 2.0, which would have a maximum speed of 480 megabits a second (more like 280, or 30 to 40 MB/s, in practice)...A month later, Apple lowered the fee to 25 cents per (end-user) system, with that money distributed between all patent holders. But it was too late. Intel wasn't coming back to the table. This was the death blow for FireWire in most of the PC market. For all of you who embrace the "fail fast" mindset, keep this story close as a reminder that some mistakes are irrevocable. This was one decision, reversed after 30 days.
- Gracana 9y agoWhat is your interpretation of the "fail fast" mindset? This sounds like the perfect example of a big project failing catastrophically that "fail fast" intends to avoid.
- Eric_WVGG 9y agoHe's talking about "fail fast" failing to rescue Firewire, not Apple.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y agoOn the contrary, OP is saying that Apple made the decision to bump the license fee up to a dollar, very quickly saw that it was too high and lowered it to 25 cents, but it didn't matter. That one simple failed decision that Apple quickly reversed still ended up killing FireWire.
- _e 9y agoIf Apple charged 25c in the beginning and increased the price over time until they found the equilibrium then it might have been a different story.
- kirykl 9y agoArticle reads like Sony started using the i-Link name before iMac was released, is this accurate ?
- dmh2000 9y agosurely one of the reasons is that very very few PC's came with fireware. so the customer base was limited.
- pmarreck 9y agoIt's "FireWire", and if you read the article, it is about WHY "very few PC's came with fireware(sic)".
- theandrewbailey 9y agoStrange. All the new PC motherboards and laptops I used in the 2000s had ports or headers for "fireware".
- kitsunesoba 9y agoIt 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 mountains of posts from people having major issues with USB 3 where 2 works great. Naturally this extra speed and solidness made for a better experience when booting from external media. One my favorite features of my 4th gen 20GB iPod was the ability to keep an OS X partition on it that I could boot from via FireWire. It worked great — well enough to get work done with, even on low power machines like 400Mhz G3 iMacs — and it saved me several times. Also, I always loved that little click when plugging in FW400 connectors (can't remember if 800 had this feature). That little bit of tactile confirmation that you've plugged your device in properly is something I wish USB had.
- throwaway91111 9y agoOn the other hand, malware would have hit commodity devices much faster. That DMA is begging to be used to root a computer.
- philsnow 9y agoSo now we've got thunderbolt.
- throwaway91111 9y agoYou're not wrong. IIRC USB C is also DMA, did I hear wrong?
- theandrewbailey 9y agoUSB-C is a fancy USB connector. It implies nothing about the protocol or anything underneath.
- rconti 9y agoMy first exposure to FireWire (like many folks, I assume) was the original 5GB iPod I bought from a friend. I thought it was SO cool that you just used this one cable to connect to your computer (in my case, my first Mac, an iBook 600mhz G3), as well as to the power adapter. The charging brick was just a brick with a firewire port and flip-out prongs that could be removed from the power brick, just like today's Mac laptop chargers. You could interchange the prongs with foreign prongs (I still have the travel kit somewhere.. of course the foreign ones don't have the same flip-out functionality). You could even put your "long" laptop charger cable on the Firewire iPod power brick! This was also true of the Airport Express. All interchangeable parts. I'm not sure if Apple was the first company to do this; today everyone has wall chargers that output a single USB port, but I don't remember it existing before then. Hell, I'm not sure if there were any devices TO charge over USB when the iPod first came out -- those little SanDisk flash MP3 players, and I'm sure the bigger Archos hard-disk based MP3 players must have had their own chargers, there's no way they charged over USB. I'm so happy that the world has gone in this direction, where I can use your Samsung USB charger to charge my Sony phone, or whatever. And Apple has still stick with the same charging brick style where you can flip out the prongs or use a longer cable. (not sure how it is now with USB C though). But that firewire power brick still makes me nostalgic, a simple design that felt so elegant 15 years ago, and still does to this day.
- eru 9y agoI never found the American flip-out plugs to work very well---the power brick is just too heavy to be held up solidly like that. But then, I only visit the states every once in a while, and usually run British-style or Australian connectors.
- nhf 9y agoApple's 12 watt USB power adapter* still has the same design. Swappable plugs compatible with all of the laptop power brick international plugs. It comes with the iPad Pro these days (and probably others, too). * https://qmart.pk/image/cache/Accessories/AppleAccessories%20/USB-Power-Adapter/USB-Power-Adapter-02-500x500.jpg https://qmart.pk/image/cache/Accessories/AppleAccessories%20...
- megamindbrian 9y agoIsn't Firewire that port no one uses?
- saagarjha 9y agoMuch of the reason for that is outlined in the article.
- jongala 9y agoIt will be around for a while, as noted in the comments on the article: IEEE 1394B was used in the F-22 and F-35, so unless those are retrofitted the standard will be propped up in some form for decades.