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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 Immerman on Saturday June 24 2017, @03:09PM (2 children)
True. But then USB was really designed as more of a peripheral bus initially, for use in applications where latency was basically a non-issue. You're not going to notice 1ms of latency in your mouse, keyboard, or external floppy drive. Even today it's a rare situation where it's going to matter, though granted it's a pretty lousy interface for a data-heavy simulation datastore or other latency-constrained application.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday June 25 2017, @02:23AM (1 child)
It's braindead by design. Any signal measure and characterization device will easily suffer. And it's not that it would cost a lot to make it sane.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday June 25 2017, @01:45PM
Only if the device requires real-time feedback from the PC it's feeding data to - so long as it's only reporting what it measured, a few ms of delay in getting the information is probably irrelevant. And if you're trying to precisely synchronize between devices then polling versus interrupts is irrelevant, what you need is a shared clock (which, honestly, I have no idea if USB provides in a useful manner)
As for not costing a lot to make it sane - maybe not in relation to a piece of signal processing equipment, but it would cost quite a bit more in relation to a $1 mouse (or $5 back when the standard was first created) And changing the standard today would quite likely cost backward compatibility, which is far more expensive.