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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: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Thursday June 22 2017, @06:41PM (19 children)
Back on 2000 or so I worked on the Linux Firewire driver. Was sure the Isochronous feature would usher in a bright future delivering video.
Trump's Grave will be the world's most popular open air toilet.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by TheGratefulNet on Thursday June 22 2017, @06:48PM (7 children)
I liked the cables and connectors. angled keyed connector that made it obvious which way to insert it; cable had a STRONG 2 wires for power, and shielded pairs for clock/data. I reused the cables and connectors to 'export' i2c from arduino systems, box to box (i2s is usually inside a box but with good cabling you can go outside the box for shortish runs).
there were some good firewire audio boxes on the market, too (high end dacs that came before UAC2 on usb audio).
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 5, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Thursday June 22 2017, @08:06PM (2 children)
There was an article I read a while back from one of the original 1394 engineers. One thing that he talked about was the design of the connector. The retention tabs were on the cable plug, not in the socket like USB. Whereas the USB team bungled the design and put the tabs in the USB socket housing. This means that over time as the tabs wear out, the socket couldn't properly retain a USB plug. Now that usb socket is mechanically damaged. Good luck replacing it. The 1394 plug has the tabs which means that if the plug wears and gets loose, you replace the cable, not the motherboard.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 23 2017, @05:30AM
Great! planned obsolescence. Go-buy-new.
It may simple be a intended "feature"..
(Score: 3, Informative) by mojo chan on Friday June 23 2017, @07:35AM
That's now how USB sockets work. The metal shield that provides retention is designed to be stronger than the cable, so that the cable is the part that wears out. In fact, with decades of data we have found that it's the plastic part that holds the contacts which tends to wear out with repeated use, not the metal housing and tabs.
USB-C fixes all of that. Apple went with a simpler design but with the flaw that the contacts are used to guide the cable in when being inserted, wearing them. USB-C has the robust metal housing for guiding and retention.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2) by black6host on Friday June 23 2017, @01:38AM (1 child)
I still like it. My last two audio interfaces have been firewire and those have been on wintel boxes. Very low latency, great for recording. When my current one goes I don't know what I'm going to replace it with. One of the things I can do now is to intercept any audio and direct it to record on tracks in my DAW. Very handy when you want to record something that others don't want you to have a copy of. (Interface is a Saffire Pro 24, the USB version, to my knowledge, does not let you capture the audio stream.) I don't use the feature often but when needed it was quite handy.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 23 2017, @05:33AM
Build DIY ?
Perhaps there are ready to use chips? or just go the FPGA route otherwise.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Friday June 23 2017, @07:38AM (1 child)
Power was one of the reasons that Firewire failed.
For a start it was variable voltage. If you were building a Firewire device you had to accept a variety of voltages, which added cost to your design, and regulate them to something useful. The USB version of any device was always going to be cheaper and "fast enough".
On the host end (the computer) you had to provide at least 12V with significant current, or you could just be cheap and provide no power but then half the Firewire devices wouldn't work... It was a mess.
The cables were more expensive for little gain too. The extra shielding was just additional cost that USB didn't need, because it uses a more robust signalling system.
And the security insanity of having an external DMA port on your computer...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 23 2017, @04:12PM
USB uses single ended shielding for some out of band messaging.
(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.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @08:34PM (5 children)
I kind of liked Firewire, but it was a huge security risk that I don't think most people realized. Or at least non-technical people. The first time I used it for networking and had a device plugged into one computer pop up for use on the other, I realized just how dangerous the technology was.
Which is a shame, because that very aspect of it made it great for debugging frozen computers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @08:47PM (1 child)
Well that just seems like a driver update was needed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @09:25PM
You're missing the point, if it needs an updated driver, that's still a security problem. It's just that the incident underlined what a security problem the bus was.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday June 22 2017, @11:39PM
I assume you're referring to DMA? Live forensic analysts liked it too, but not necessarily for its speed.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 23 2017, @05:40AM
There could been some switch implemented for restricted use?
Ie only allow remote memory access outside of specified memory range if said switch is on.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday June 23 2017, @08:17AM
sudo mod me up
(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.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday June 23 2017, @09:47AM
It was backed principally by two companies who are notorious for their gratuitously-incompatible lock-in-enabling technology. It was pretty much predestined to fail as they mutated it to make sure you had to buy from them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @10:01PM
OMG yes - I was making use of your work but iirc we had custom 1394 drivers for our bus-filling needs. Multisource with one storage destination, where the savings happened by using mostly off the shelf at the destination. Iirc 1394 was incredible, we tried usb2 which nominally was a little worse but iirc technically unidirectionally capped at half and (iirc... just assume that from here out...) we found we got about 1/4 to 1/8 the performance. We could saturate 1394 and basically only lose the excess. What a world of difference, in performance. We had custom 1394 drivers but then mmm maybe in 2001? or 2002? we converted to yours, when all our newer boards started running micro micro linux kernels (except for some cmos(?)->radio speed a2d->1394 chip with a surface mounted control ic, and some power circuitry).
Good times, memory lanes! Thanks for your excellent work, as far as I know that company has grown to 7+ figures of annual income and hundreds of staff, and their core products probably still use that exact same work (never waste such pristine work!)