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Target disk mode over FireWire was magical back in the day. Nothing like turning someone’s laptop into an oversized external hard drive to rescue data or get a

Target disk mode over FireWire was magical back in the day. Nothing like turning someone’s laptop into an oversized external hard drive to rescue data or get a borked OS X installation booting again.

xattt 3y ago
FireWire had IP networking stacks in Windows and OS X in 2007. You could daisy chain a bunch of devices together to share a network connection.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Sure but it was very expensive compared to USB and Ethernet so Firewire never caught on with mainstream conumers other than some niche cases like camcorders. Thunderbolt was also expensive, which is why adoption was limited, but it's becoming more maisntream since Intel and Apple have been pushing it in the last years, adn piggibacking over USB-C makes it an easy sell comapred to requireing a separate connector like firewire. Still, thunderbolt peripherals are way more expensive than USB ones, so like Firewire before, use is still more in the enthusianst/professional space.
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    > it was very expensive compared to USB and Ethernet so Firewire never caught on Compared to Gigabit Ethernet back in that time period? Firewire was a huge bargain.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      No, not gabit, but 100 Ethernet was more than enough for what average consumers had to transfer back then, and it was significantly cheaper and more available than firewire. It was more likely your HDD to be a bottleneck for faster network transfers.
      - GeekyBear 3y ago
        Even the first version of Firewire was four times as fast as that. Completely loading a 5 Gig iPod with music over that first version of Firewire still took a few minutes.
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        >Even the first version of Firewire was four times as fast as that. Yes and? At what price points? What was the adoption rate? How many mainstream PCs and peripherals worldwide had it? Wherever you went, whoever you met, you were way more likely to find a USB or ethernet port to hook up for a fast transfer rather than Firewire. At least in my country at the time, maybe you lived in Cupertino/Palo Alto where evryone had iMacs and firewire. Just like VHS over Betamax, USB won because it was cheaper and more convenient despite technically inferior to firewire and consumer tewch at the time was a race to the bottom in terms of price. >Completely loading a 5 Gig iPod with music over that first version of Firewire still took a few minutes. Only the first gen iPod had firewire before switching to USB, and even then, what was the point of Firewire 400 on it when the tiny and slow mechanical HDD on it was the real bottleneck. There was no way the iPod would have been remotely as successful had it stayed on firewire. Apple didn't have the market sahre back then to enforce their own less popular standard. Only when it switched to USB and supporting PCs did the iPod really take off.
        GeekyBear 3y ago
        > Yes and? At the time, USB was still limited to 12 megabits per second and transferring that same 5 Gigs of MP3 files would have taken over an hour. The firewire iPod did it in a couple of minutes. USB was cheaper, but dog slow. Gigabit Ethernet was faster but WAY more expensive.
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        I see you keep ignoring my arguments so this is the last time I say it. Again, only the first gen iPod was firewire exclusive and it was not yet a maisntream product since it was still Mac only, so avergae consumer demand at home computers for Firewire was lackluster and the iPod didn't change that. Firewire was niche or non existent in the home PC space and it died completley with the launch of USB 2.0 remaining alive only in the pro-sumer space. >Gigabit Ethernet was faster but WAY more expensive. Please show me where I mentioned Gigabit ethernet as an argument. I said 100 Ethernet which was dirt cheap and almost every PC and Mac had it, as opposed to Firewire, so if you needed a fast cross platform transfer it was your best bet at the time in terms of cost and mass availability over firewire before USB 2.0 and gigabit hit the market.
RachelF 3y ago
Yeah, we built a similar system a generation ago using FireWire on x86 and Linux. FireWire at 800Mbps beat Gigabit Ethernet in terms of latency for a rather hard real-time system.
- rabi_molar 3y ago
  I remember the "good ol days" when I would always opt for a FireWire audio interface for music production and live performance over USB for exactly this reason. I'd get way better latency and stability.
  - justnotworthit 3y ago
    Any ideas what im I supposed to do with the firewire mixer i bought 14 years ago?
    - wmf 3y ago
      Get a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 dongle and a Thunderbolt 2 to Firewire dongle?
    - robes 3y ago
      You can still use it! I keep an old ThinkPad X61 & T400 around with mini-Firewire ports on my MOTU 828 mkII interface. It is also a DAC over SPDIF for my much newer Ryzen desktop. I would like to try Thunderbolt to FW800 to FW400 adapters to see if I can get it working on something more modern, as I learned it has mainline Linux kernel support.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Even now an ancient FW400 HDD enclosure of mine is less flaky than a lot of USB storage I’ve used.
Fnoord 3y ago
Way before that there was SCSI. The low cost is price. Asus for example with their ASUS ThunderboltEX 4 allows you to have TB4 via PCIe card. The neat thing about USB4 was same as PATA and later SATA: widely and relatively cheap available in consumer hardware. SCSI and FireWire were technically superior but were neither cheap nor widely available. Oh and I don't know about SCSI but FireWire was actually a security risk.
- tga_d 3y ago
  I know thunderbolt at least up through 3 was generally carte blanche DMA, so an obvious security nightmare (strictly speaking no worse than cold boot attacks and the like, but there's a practicality difference between dumping raw DIMMs and just plugging in a thumb drive -- or inter-machine links like TFA, for that matter). Does TB4 bother trying to solve this?
  - p_l 3y ago
    Not really. Just like with OHCI 1394, it's responsibility of host IOMMU to handle it.
- vegardx 3y ago
  Just a fair warning about these cards, the support is flakey at best. You should research if it works with your motherboard and CPU before going down that route. I did a lot of research on this because I wanted to connect my Gaming-PC to an Apple Studio Display over optical Thunderbolt, but quickly decided against it. Luckily there are good alternatives. I landed on a solution using a Belkin[0] DisplayPort and USB to Thunderbolt-cable. I just get USB2.0 speeds, but it's enough for my needs. I'm also able to extend it using an active DisplayPort 1.4 extender, for a total of 10 meters cable. [0] https://www.belkin.com/support-article/?articleNum=316883 https://www.belkin.com/support-article/?articleNum=316883
bimguy 3y ago
Target disk mode to my workstation and saving someone's whole system with Disk Warrior used to be my favourite and most rewarding task. APFS did away with that joy, if a Mac OS systems fails now you have almost no chance of saving the system from itself.

xattt 3y ago

FireWire had IP networking stacks in Windows and OS X in 2007. You could daisy chain a bunch of devices together to share a network connection.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Sure but it was very expensive compared to USB and Ethernet so Firewire never caught on with mainstream conumers other than some niche cases like camcorders. Thunderbolt was also expensive, which is why adoption was limited, but it's becoming more maisntream since Intel and Apple have been pushing it in the last years, adn piggibacking over USB-C makes it an easy sell comapred to requireing a separate connector like firewire. Still, thunderbolt peripherals are way more expensive than USB ones, so like Firewire before, use is still more in the enthusianst/professional space.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  > it was very expensive compared to USB and Ethernet so Firewire never caught on Compared to Gigabit Ethernet back in that time period? Firewire was a huge bargain.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    No, not gabit, but 100 Ethernet was more than enough for what average consumers had to transfer back then, and it was significantly cheaper and more available than firewire. It was more likely your HDD to be a bottleneck for faster network transfers.
    - GeekyBear 3y ago
      Even the first version of Firewire was four times as fast as that. Completely loading a 5 Gig iPod with music over that first version of Firewire still took a few minutes.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        >Even the first version of Firewire was four times as fast as that. Yes and? At what price points? What was the adoption rate? How many mainstream PCs and peripherals worldwide had it? Wherever you went, whoever you met, you were way more likely to find a USB or ethernet port to hook up for a fast transfer rather than Firewire. At least in my country at the time, maybe you lived in Cupertino/Palo Alto where evryone had iMacs and firewire. Just like VHS over Betamax, USB won because it was cheaper and more convenient despite technically inferior to firewire and consumer tewch at the time was a race to the bottom in terms of price. >Completely loading a 5 Gig iPod with music over that first version of Firewire still took a few minutes. Only the first gen iPod had firewire before switching to USB, and even then, what was the point of Firewire 400 on it when the tiny and slow mechanical HDD on it was the real bottleneck. There was no way the iPod would have been remotely as successful had it stayed on firewire. Apple didn't have the market sahre back then to enforce their own less popular standard. Only when it switched to USB and supporting PCs did the iPod really take off.
        GeekyBear 3y ago
        > Yes and? At the time, USB was still limited to 12 megabits per second and transferring that same 5 Gigs of MP3 files would have taken over an hour. The firewire iPod did it in a couple of minutes. USB was cheaper, but dog slow. Gigabit Ethernet was faster but WAY more expensive.
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        I see you keep ignoring my arguments so this is the last time I say it. Again, only the first gen iPod was firewire exclusive and it was not yet a maisntream product since it was still Mac only, so avergae consumer demand at home computers for Firewire was lackluster and the iPod didn't change that. Firewire was niche or non existent in the home PC space and it died completley with the launch of USB 2.0 remaining alive only in the pro-sumer space. >Gigabit Ethernet was faster but WAY more expensive. Please show me where I mentioned Gigabit ethernet as an argument. I said 100 Ethernet which was dirt cheap and almost every PC and Mac had it, as opposed to Firewire, so if you needed a fast cross platform transfer it was your best bet at the time in terms of cost and mass availability over firewire before USB 2.0 and gigabit hit the market.

RachelF 3y ago

Yeah, we built a similar system a generation ago using FireWire on x86 and Linux. FireWire at 800Mbps beat Gigabit Ethernet in terms of latency for a rather hard real-time system.

rabi_molar 3y ago
I remember the "good ol days" when I would always opt for a FireWire audio interface for music production and live performance over USB for exactly this reason. I'd get way better latency and stability.
- justnotworthit 3y ago
  Any ideas what im I supposed to do with the firewire mixer i bought 14 years ago?
  - wmf 3y ago
    Get a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 dongle and a Thunderbolt 2 to Firewire dongle?
  - robes 3y ago
    You can still use it! I keep an old ThinkPad X61 & T400 around with mini-Firewire ports on my MOTU 828 mkII interface. It is also a DAC over SPDIF for my much newer Ryzen desktop. I would like to try Thunderbolt to FW800 to FW400 adapters to see if I can get it working on something more modern, as I learned it has mainline Linux kernel support.
- jwells89 3y ago
  Even now an ancient FW400 HDD enclosure of mine is less flaky than a lot of USB storage I’ve used.

Fnoord 3y ago

Way before that there was SCSI. The low cost is price. Asus for example with their ASUS ThunderboltEX 4 allows you to have TB4 via PCIe card. The neat thing about USB4 was same as PATA and later SATA: widely and relatively cheap available in consumer hardware. SCSI and FireWire were technically superior but were neither cheap nor widely available. Oh and I don't know about SCSI but FireWire was actually a security risk.

tga_d 3y ago
I know thunderbolt at least up through 3 was generally carte blanche DMA, so an obvious security nightmare (strictly speaking no worse than cold boot attacks and the like, but there's a practicality difference between dumping raw DIMMs and just plugging in a thumb drive -- or inter-machine links like TFA, for that matter). Does TB4 bother trying to solve this?
- p_l 3y ago
  Not really. Just like with OHCI 1394, it's responsibility of host IOMMU to handle it.
vegardx 3y ago
Just a fair warning about these cards, the support is flakey at best. You should research if it works with your motherboard and CPU before going down that route. I did a lot of research on this because I wanted to connect my Gaming-PC to an Apple Studio Display over optical Thunderbolt, but quickly decided against it. Luckily there are good alternatives. I landed on a solution using a Belkin[0] DisplayPort and USB to Thunderbolt-cable. I just get USB2.0 speeds, but it's enough for my needs. I'm also able to extend it using an active DisplayPort 1.4 extender, for a total of 10 meters cable. [0] https://www.belkin.com/support-article/?articleNum=316883 https://www.belkin.com/support-article/?articleNum=316883

bimguy 3y ago

Target disk mode to my workstation and saving someone's whole system with Disk Warrior used to be my favourite and most rewarding task. APFS did away with that joy, if a Mac OS systems fails now you have almost no chance of saving the system from itself.