
How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor - anjalik
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/the-rise-and-fall-of-firewire-the-standard-everyone-couldnt-quite-agree-on/?mbid=synd_digg
======
jjguy
> After being informed of IBM's hundreds of millions in yearly patent revenue,
> CEO Steve Jobs authorized a change in FireWire's licensing policy. Apple
> would now charge a fee of $1 per port. (So if a device has two ports, that's
> $2 per unit.)...Intel sent its CTO to talk to Jobs about the change, but the
> meeting went badly. Intel decided to withdraw its support for FireWire—to
> pull the plug on efforts to build FireWire into its chipsets—and instead
> throw its weight behind USB 2.0, which would have a maximum speed of 480
> megabits a second (more like 280, or 30 to 40 MB/s, in practice)...A month
> later, Apple lowered the fee to 25 cents per (end-user) system, with that
> money distributed between all patent holders. But it was too late. Intel
> wasn't coming back to the table. This was the death blow for FireWire in
> most of the PC market.

For all of you who embrace the "fail fast" mindset, keep this story close as a
reminder that some mistakes are irrevocable. This was one decision, reversed
after 30 days.

~~~
lobster_johnson
It's also a good reminder that Jobs, for all the posthumous praise he gets,
made some rather stupid business blunders during his tenures at Apple.

Apple can be aggressive about its tech today (such as Lightning and
Thunderbolt; anyone know what they charge for those?), but back then they were
much more of a niche player.

~~~
Tloewald
Thunderbolt is Intel AFAIK. (Correction: apparently Intel made some claims but
Apple owns it.)

My guess is Intel probably would have backed USB over Firewire regardless
since it had a stake in USB.

The irony is, USB would probably have failed without Apple.

The fact is that Intel has repeatedly chosen its own technology to promote,
and until recently it had the market power to force everyone else to follow
suit.

~~~
baobrain
> (Correction: apparently Intel made some claims but Apple owns it.)

This doesn't seem to be correct. While I can't find anything with a simple
search, the thunderbolt technology website is copyrighted by Intel, and
Wikipedia directly attributes the development to Intel.

Iirc apple was mostly a first adapter to thunderbolt.

~~~
GeekyBear
At the time of the first technology demos, the story was that Apple and Intel
jointly developed it.

[https://www.engadget.com/2009/09/26/exclusive-apple-
dictated...](https://www.engadget.com/2009/09/26/exclusive-apple-dictated-
light-peak-creation-to-intel-could-be/)

------
dcosson
One major thing not mentioned is that apprently not everyone bothered
implementing FireWire the same. I never learned the technical reason, but if
you bought certain digital audio recording interfaces circa 2007, you learned
in the fine print/after you called customer service that it only worked with
TI FireWire ports . These were the ones used on Macs at this point, I had a
dell laptop which used a cheaper manufacturer so (perhaps combined with the
fact that my recording interface itself was not a high end one and maybe cut
some corners on its end too) the audio recording quality was staticy and
uneven. I ended up having to return it and get a lower-bandwidth, noticeably
higher latency USB powered one because at least USB ports were consistent.

I was always curious if some manufacturers were not implementing the full spec
here (maybe because by this time according to the article FireWire was already
on its last legs), or if this was due to flaws in the spec that left certain
things optional or something and that ruined interoperability.

~~~
ukyrgf
I don't miss those days at all. I chose to build a fairly expensive setup ~10
years ago that is now completely obsolete. I'd have to build a 32-bit Windows
XP machine to get it to even work. It got replaced by maybe $400 in USB
devices and they'll power up on any computer I plug it into.

~~~
eropple
Yeah - the future's pretty awesome. I can run a three-camera live studio with
six microphones off a laptop these days (for Internet streaming; higher
quality obviously requires a little more work).

------
rconti
My first exposure to FireWire (like many folks, I assume) was the original 5GB
iPod I bought from a friend. I thought it was SO cool that you just used this
one cable to connect to your computer (in my case, my first Mac, an iBook
600mhz G3), as well as to the power adapter. The charging brick was just a
brick with a firewire port and flip-out prongs that could be removed from the
power brick, just like today's Mac laptop chargers. You could interchange the
prongs with foreign prongs (I still have the travel kit somewhere.. of course
the foreign ones don't have the same flip-out functionality). You could even
put your "long" laptop charger cable on the Firewire iPod power brick! This
was also true of the Airport Express. All interchangeable parts.

I'm not sure if Apple was the first company to do this; today everyone has
wall chargers that output a single USB port, but I don't remember it existing
before then. Hell, I'm not sure if there were any devices TO charge over USB
when the iPod first came out -- those little SanDisk flash MP3 players, and
I'm sure the bigger Archos hard-disk based MP3 players must have had their own
chargers, there's no way they charged over USB.

I'm so happy that the world has gone in this direction, where I can use your
Samsung USB charger to charge my Sony phone, or whatever. And Apple has still
stick with the same charging brick style where you can flip out the prongs or
use a longer cable. (not sure how it is now with USB C though).

But that firewire power brick still makes me nostalgic, a simple design that
felt so elegant 15 years ago, and still does to this day.

~~~
eru
I never found the American flip-out plugs to work very well---the power brick
is just too heavy to be held up solidly like that.

But then, I only visit the states every once in a while, and usually run
British-style or Australian connectors.

------
bluedino
I loved FireWire. I had an external HD and DVD-RW, I could daisy chain them
and connect them to my Dell, Sony, and Apple machines. Faster than USB, only
needed one port... everyone complained FireWire was more expensive but the
devices performed so much better.

~~~
JohnBooty
I _still_ love it. =)

FW800 gets close to 80MB/sec, which is really as much as I need for my
backup/archiving needs. And the daisy-chaining is just awesome.

------
jancsika
> Speeds across networks of all sizes are now so high that there's also little
> need for something like FireWire. "The packets can arrive way before it's
> needed, because it's so fast," Sirkin noted. "So you don't need to worry
> about being synchronous any more."

For use cases where _reliable_ low-latency transport is required (i.e.,
Firewire's main strength), what could possibly be meant by "packets arrive way
before it's needed"?

~~~
iheartmemcache
At least on Linux, you can easily be barraged by tons of IRQs from your
FireWire device. Every time some data comes in from your device (let's say
some music production platform) it's going to DMA that data right on over via
a PCI lane or 4 then fire off an interrupt to inform your OS "hey hey got some
new information for ya!".

Now imagine the platform was poorly designed so it fires off that IRQ once for
each track. You're re-tracking the drums since the drummer you're recording
couldn't work with a click track. Let's say conservatively, you've got 2
overhead condensers, some ambient mic, and an SM57 at the kick. He's working
against the guitarist and bass tracks along with some scratch vox. Depending
on how you're patching and tracks are configured, you could easily have 12
tracks all firing a "hey I've got data for you! CONSUME IT!".

Each one of those interrupts is expensive, mind you. I mean not so much now,
where we can shield processes on 16-core HT Xeons and basically dedicate a
whole core to solely dealing with the interrupts. But imagine the early 2000s
where you had P3 single-core's running at 600 MHzs. Each IRQ will context
switch, which means whatever active process that was scheduled now gets
bumped. The first IRQ is serviced and that process gets back to work and maybe
it doesn't even have time to restore it's execution context before ANOTHER
dang IRQ comes in. Like I say, not really a problem these days, but not so
long ago....

~~~
crmd
>SM57 at the kick

57 resonant peak is at 200 Hz with steep rolloff below. It will sound like a
bedroom recording no matter what you do with IRQs and DMAs.

------
kitsunesoba
It really is a shame that FireWire didn't work out. Aside from the far better
transfer speeds, when used for external storage FireWire has _always_ been
more solid. USB storage has a nasty habit of periodically flickering out for a
split second and has generally been more flaky, something that's actually
gotten _worse_ with USB 3 — if you haven't run into this set of issues
yourself, do a quick Google and you'll find mountains of posts from people
having major issues with USB 3 where 2 works great.

Naturally this extra speed and solidness made for a better experience when
booting from external media. One my favorite features of my 4th gen 20GB iPod
was the ability to keep an OS X partition on it that I could boot from via
FireWire. It worked great — well enough to get work done with, even on low
power machines like 400Mhz G3 iMacs — and it saved me several times.

Also, I always loved that little click when plugging in FW400 connectors
(can't remember if 800 had this feature). That little bit of tactile
confirmation that you've plugged your device in properly is something I wish
USB had.

~~~
throwaway91111
On the other hand, malware would have hit commodity devices much faster. That
DMA is begging to be used to root a computer.

~~~
GeekyBear
In that time period, most laptops had one or two PCMCIA/PC Card/CardBus slots
that had the same vulnerability.

They were commonly used back then to add modems, network adapters and even
hard drives.

~~~
astrodust
Ah, the good old "People Can't Memorize Computer Indusry Acronyms" standard. I
still have no idea what it stands for.

------
dsr_
I've used FireWire to connect external disks (verdict: as stable as eSATA,
much better than USB2) and to pull video from a cable set-top-box (verdict:
the cable box was crappy; no problems directly attributable to the FireWire
connection.)

The major problem with FireWire, shared with Thunderbolt, is that it offers
DMA to external devices:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMA_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMA_attack)

~~~
walterbell
Doesn't USB-C have the same DMA problem?

Did eSATA also lose to USB? I don't think it has the DMA problem.

~~~
rangibaby
I think people with actual need for eSATA have moved on to PCIe SSDs. USB3
killed everything else at the low end; I remember buying an external HDD with
FW800 in the olden days of 2011, then getting a USB3 drive in 2013 which is
still going strong and fast (enough).

~~~
Dylan16807
> I think people with actual need for eSATA have moved on to PCIe SSDs.

People that specifically needed their drives to be both fast and external
moved to internal drives? I don't understand.

~~~
rangibaby
External PCIe (whatever) is kind of the point of Thunderbolt

~~~
Dylan16807
People use thunderbolt NVMe drives? I didn't know those even existed. Is that
meaningfully better than USB with UAS?

------
Grazester
I loved FireWire. It was faster in the real world than usb 2.0(this was fire
400 too and even 800) and my computer felt so responsive while transferring
files. Ethernet over FireWire in the days of winxp was great also!!

------
throwaway2016a
Since we're sharing our nostalgic Firewire stories... the first video camera I
ever bought (almost 20 years ago) could only connect to computers via
Firewire. I remember almost all digital cameras on the market only supported
it. It seemed like a clear winner.

It's interesting to see an article that explains why it died.

~~~
NikolaeVarius
Yeah, I remember this time being strange. I had bought a good bit of Firewire
equipment for my Cameras and even got a PCI-E card for my PC. It just seemed
to vanish without a trace. I still have those cables and accessories
somewhere.

------
dreamcompiler
I call this the "invented here" syndrome: When company management becomes so
dysfunctional they don't trust anything invented at their own company unless
it's been externally validated.

~~~
rconti
It's interesting that Apple, the company famous for dropping the floppy disk
drive, CD drive, ethernet port, hell, even the USB port, was afraid to ADOPT
something new.

------
Yellow_Boat
This is an amazing story about hardware innovation, politics and some kind of
bullying. I am amazed that despite all, corporations had innovation in focus,
even at the cost of decreasing profit margins.

------
edzorg
Great article - unbelievable really.

Is USB-C by all measures now superior to FireWire? Or are we still paying for
Jobs' mistake?

~~~
wtallis
USB-C is just a connector. Some of the devices using that connector only
support USB 2.0 signaling over that connector, so USB-C does not imply
complete superiority over FireWire.

~~~
CydeWeys
Do you have an example of a device that only uses USB 2.0 over a USB-C
connector? I wasn't aware of such a thing.

~~~
mangix
All phones with type c

~~~
CydeWeys
Not true. My phone, a Pixel, has USB 3.1 Gen 1. The Galaxy S8 is also USB 3.1
but I'm unable to find which gen it is from five minutes' Googling.

------
acomjean
I've used it for hardrives and video cameras (it was the standard way to get
Video off a minidv tape camera). I always found it worked well.

But on video I Remember the different names being bing used being confusing.
And while all macs had it some pcs didn't. With USB being ubiquitous and USB 2
being good enough when it finally showed up.

Somewhat oddly mac was a big pusher of USB as that's what the original iMac
used.

Had intel put it in its chipsets...

------
kirykl
Article reads like Sony started using the i-Link name before iMac was
released, is this accurate ?

~~~
pmarreck
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394)

It looks like it was about the same time

------
jongala
It will be around for a while, as noted in the comments on the article: IEEE
1394B was used in the F-22 and F-35, so unless those are retrofitted the
standard will be propped up in some form for decades.

------
megamindbrian
Isn't Firewire that port no one uses?

~~~
saagarjha
Much of the reason for that is outlined in the article.

------
dmh2000
surely one of the reasons is that very very few PC's came with fireware. so
the customer base was limited.

~~~
pmarreck
It's "FireWire", and if you read the article, it is about WHY "very few PC's
came with fireware(sic)".

------
payne92
FireWire: the hardware interface where the designers & implementers thought
offering unfettered DMA was a good idea.

~~~
astrodust
At the time it was a good idea. It avoided bottlenecking everything through
the CPU in an era when CPU power was extremely scarce: A 200MHz G3 chip
doesn't have a lot of surplus horsepower.

Let's also hear your whines about how the C64 didn't have protected memory and
the Apple ][ was so easy to hack because you could open the lid and poke
around with a logic probe.

