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This isn't brought up enough when people talk about FireWire and "good engineering". Good engineering means practical engineering. It means things like choosing

This isn't brought up enough when people talk about FireWire and "good engineering". Good engineering means practical engineering. It means things like choosing a sane, common voltage that is well suited to the already-existing real world. Picking 8V-30V is the kind of decision that sounds beautiful to a utopian engineer working high in an office tower, and I'm sure it would be lovely if we could have instantly warped into a world of full adoption, but here in the real world your standard is going to have to be useful today, and it's going to have to be useful with more than just brand-new top-of-the-line freshly designed kit. Any engineer who would willingly forgo access to the entire world of already-existing 5V ICs is not a good engineer in my books. To be fair to them though, it's very easy to get caught up in the beauty of those theoretical designs and forget that the best-selling car is a Toyota Corolla, not a Lamborghini.

mschuster91 6y ago
Joke's on FireWire in the end though, USB-C ended up with the abomination that is USB-PD plus a literal shitload of incompatible other power negotiation schemes (Qualcomm and Apple being the most notorious).
derefr 6y ago
To nit-pick your analogy: is a Lamborghini really “engineered better” than a Corolla, in systems engineering terms? (I.e. the sort of terms a NASA program is budgeted in, when you have to consider the costs of potentially propping up your suppliers in the face of them collapsing, training your future employees to pass on institutional knowledge, etc.) Or, to put that another way: is the total profit per Lamborghini sold really higher than the total profit per Corolla sold, after the CapEx and OpEx of any maintenance + spare-parts supply logistics + recall costs + training + supply contracts + etc. are taken into account? (I would assume, if it were, Lamborghini would have a higher market cap.)
- chungus_khan 6y ago
  I think that actually strengthens my analogy (and was really my point). A Lamborghini is full of flashy, pie-in-the-sky engineering that often ignores practicality in favour of flash and performance. On paper, it's a beautiful machine, but much like in the case of FireWire, it doesn't meet eye to eye with the real world around it. The Toyota is less ambitious, more constrained by reality, and while it certainly doesn't match the on-paper specs of the Lamborghini, it is in every way more practical and viable as a system. I would consider the Toyota to be the better engineered of the two when looking at them as cars and not as toys, even though it lacks the technical wow factor.
  - derefr 6y ago
    I always understood Firewire to be a standard designed for complementary use-cases to USB. Firewire isn't an attempt at "USB but better" (though devices could theoretically be made to use it that way); it's an attempt at "powered SCSI, but smaller and more ruggedized." It's a professional-equipment port, designed—on the one hand—for devices like laptops that can't fit the older, full-scale professional-equipment port (like SAS or mini-XLR); and on the other hand, for manufacturers of high-BOM high-margin professional equipment, as an extra port they can slap onto their device to allow these portable devices to connect to them. In that sense, Firewire is less analogous to a Lambo ("a better car"), and more akin to a truck. But a very tiny truck, designed for both off-roading and portability. Which is to say: an ATV. An ATV isn't better at being a car than a car is, but it is better at being a truck than a car is (though worse at being a truck than a truck is.) But sometimes, especially in constrained environments (e.g. search-and-rescue in the Alaskan wilderness), a truck won't fit, and a car won't work. So you need an ATV. It's well-engineered for that particular set of constraints. Which is also the deal with Thunderbolt: it's PCI-e, but smaller and ruggedized, for places PCI-e itself wouldn't work (like a laptop), but where you nevertheless still need PCI-e -alike performance and bus semantics.
    - chungus_khan 6y ago
      FireWire actually predates USB, and was certainly seen as a competitor during the design process for USB. It was originally drawn up as a general-purpose serial bus, but with a particular eye at replacing external SCSI interfaces. Certainly it's designed to interface with all sorts of professional equipment, but even in this space that particular decision is a poor one because of the universality of 5V components. Early FireWire-equipped laptops varied wildly in actual voltage delivery capabilities, and even Apple's generally capped out at around 9V, and the standard is extremely awkward and expensive to implement on the device side for many classes of devices. The main issue is that devices have to be capable of handling unregulated voltage between 8V-30V. For high-end professional equipment this is obnoxious and expensive, but manageable, but it's a complete nonstarter for nearly all other equipment, and that meant that even as the price of implementing FireWire signaling went down, it couldn't expand into a bunch of spaces it was perfectly capable of working in (including lower-end versions of said professional equipment). Even including an optional 5V power pin would have improved this situation, and could have put FireWire in a similar situation to Thunderbolt 3 now, capable of functioning with both high-end professional equipment and ordinary consumer devices.

mschuster91 6y ago

Joke's on FireWire in the end though, USB-C ended up with the abomination that is USB-PD plus a literal shitload of incompatible other power negotiation schemes (Qualcomm and Apple being the most notorious).

derefr 6y ago

To nit-pick your analogy: is a Lamborghini really “engineered better” than a Corolla, in systems engineering terms? (I.e. the sort of terms a NASA program is budgeted in, when you have to consider the costs of potentially propping up your suppliers in the face of them collapsing, training your future employees to pass on institutional knowledge, etc.) Or, to put that another way: is the total profit per Lamborghini sold really higher than the total profit per Corolla sold, after the CapEx and OpEx of any maintenance + spare-parts supply logistics + recall costs + training + supply contracts + etc. are taken into account? (I would assume, if it were, Lamborghini would have a higher market cap.)

chungus_khan 6y ago
I think that actually strengthens my analogy (and was really my point). A Lamborghini is full of flashy, pie-in-the-sky engineering that often ignores practicality in favour of flash and performance. On paper, it's a beautiful machine, but much like in the case of FireWire, it doesn't meet eye to eye with the real world around it. The Toyota is less ambitious, more constrained by reality, and while it certainly doesn't match the on-paper specs of the Lamborghini, it is in every way more practical and viable as a system. I would consider the Toyota to be the better engineered of the two when looking at them as cars and not as toys, even though it lacks the technical wow factor.
- derefr 6y ago
  I always understood Firewire to be a standard designed for complementary use-cases to USB. Firewire isn't an attempt at "USB but better" (though devices could theoretically be made to use it that way); it's an attempt at "powered SCSI, but smaller and more ruggedized." It's a professional-equipment port, designed—on the one hand—for devices like laptops that can't fit the older, full-scale professional-equipment port (like SAS or mini-XLR); and on the other hand, for manufacturers of high-BOM high-margin professional equipment, as an extra port they can slap onto their device to allow these portable devices to connect to them. In that sense, Firewire is less analogous to a Lambo ("a better car"), and more akin to a truck. But a very tiny truck, designed for both off-roading and portability. Which is to say: an ATV. An ATV isn't better at being a car than a car is, but it is better at being a truck than a car is (though worse at being a truck than a truck is.) But sometimes, especially in constrained environments (e.g. search-and-rescue in the Alaskan wilderness), a truck won't fit, and a car won't work. So you need an ATV. It's well-engineered for that particular set of constraints. Which is also the deal with Thunderbolt: it's PCI-e, but smaller and ruggedized, for places PCI-e itself wouldn't work (like a laptop), but where you nevertheless still need PCI-e -alike performance and bus semantics.
  - chungus_khan 6y ago
    FireWire actually predates USB, and was certainly seen as a competitor during the design process for USB. It was originally drawn up as a general-purpose serial bus, but with a particular eye at replacing external SCSI interfaces. Certainly it's designed to interface with all sorts of professional equipment, but even in this space that particular decision is a poor one because of the universality of 5V components. Early FireWire-equipped laptops varied wildly in actual voltage delivery capabilities, and even Apple's generally capped out at around 9V, and the standard is extremely awkward and expensive to implement on the device side for many classes of devices. The main issue is that devices have to be capable of handling unregulated voltage between 8V-30V. For high-end professional equipment this is obnoxious and expensive, but manageable, but it's a complete nonstarter for nearly all other equipment, and that meant that even as the price of implementing FireWire signaling went down, it couldn't expand into a bunch of spaces it was perfectly capable of working in (including lower-end versions of said professional equipment). Even including an optional 5V power pin would have improved this situation, and could have put FireWire in a similar situation to Thunderbolt 3 now, capable of functioning with both high-end professional equipment and ordinary consumer devices.