The rise and fall of FireWire—IEEE 1394, an interface standard boasting high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer—is one of the most tragic tales in the history of computer technology. The standard was forged in the fires of collaboration. A joint effort from several competitors including Apple, IBM, and Sony, it was a triumph of design for the greater good. FireWire represented a unified standard across the whole industry, one serial bus to rule them all. Realized to the fullest, FireWire could replace SCSI and the unwieldy mess of ports and cables at the back of a desktop computer.
Yet FireWire's principal creator, Apple, nearly killed it before it could appear in a single device. And eventually the Cupertino company effectively did kill FireWire, just as it seemed poised to dominate the industry.
The story of how FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor serves today as a fine reminder that no technology, however promising, well-engineered, or well-liked, is immune to inter- and intra-company politics or to our reluctance to step outside our comfort zone.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @07:27PM
I hate to tell you this, but you didn't deliver.
FireWire loved to corrupt my storage. The device
didn't matter. I could use an IDE drive in a
FireWire converter box, with either of two
different chipsets, and data got mangled. I could
use CompactFlash in either of two FireWire readers,
and again my filesystem was corrupted.
USB just worked. I prefered slow-ass USB 1.1 even.