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from the collaboration-what-collaboration? dept.
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: 2) by TheRaven on Friday June 23 2017, @08:24AM (1 child)
Isochronous was a killer feature for tape-based DV cameras, which would write data from the tape to FireWire at a fixed rate and had minimal buffering on the device side. Stutters writing to disk were fine, because the host could buffer in RAM, but any delays writing to the interconnect meant dropped data and video corruption. USB-2 introduced an isochronous mode, which removed FireWire's advantage here and a year or two later cameras started using Compact Flash instead of DV tapes (I still have a small stack of DV tapes still in their packaging as a result of not spotting this transition early enough).
I always felt the biggest missed opportunity with FireWire was Apple not allowing the iSight to connect directly to the iPod. My 20GB iPod had double the capacity of a DV tape (and could dump the contents to a computer a lot faster than any DV camera I used). For quite a few things I did, filming using the iSight plugged into a laptop was more convenient than using the DV camera and futzing with tapes, but for anything where I needed to move the camera a lot it was impractical to have a tethered camera. A small dock for clipping the iSight to the iPod would have been ideal for a lot of amateur film projects and would have reduced the barrier to entry for a lot of people (the iSight was about £100, the iPod around £200, DV cameras were around £400 - and a lot of people who might have wanted to buy one already had an iPod).
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 23 2017, @04:10PM
That would mean less equipment needs and low cost. Not a Apple thing..
Guess DIY would been a great thing here to workaround Apple.