IEEE-134/a/b
Hello,
Just wanted to make some things clear about some research that Apple started in the late 80's to come up with an improved data transfer standard (over SCSI).
The reason it is called Firewire is because the connectors were observed to have 'thermal noise' during use.
Apple offered up Firewire to the IEEE standards body. They accepted it in 1995, giving it standard # 1394. That is why it is sometimes referred to as IEEE-1394 or as 1394-1995. This standard was capable of 100 Mbits/sec through put.
IEEE-1394a was an improvement to the standard and pushed the max datarate upto 400 Mbits/sec. IEEE-1394b (which was offered in 2001 and approved by 2002) raised not only the data rate, but offered some new cabling options.
1394b is backward compatible on original cabling (which makes it easy for hubs and adapters to go from the new cabling to the old with nothing other than a physical connector change). On new cabling, it allows for up to 800 Mbits/sec. On fibre cabling (ie, optical) it will go upto a maximum throughput of 3200Mbits/sec.
Due to these different cabling formats, and the speed, some networking magazines did speculative articles on how you could use 1394b (optical) as a backbone for a network.
This all went away when several companies showed 10gigabit ethernet products.
I prefer Firewire/1394 for anything that is moving any amount of data.
As the megapixels increase in camera's, going to firewire makes alot more sense.
Now, I have a wacked out opinion. Intel (and some others) pushed the idea of USB. It would be great for alot of low speed devices (keyboards, mice, etc). Intel had a VERY diffucult time pushing this. Most manufacturers were happy with PS2 (not the game consol).
Then, Apple included USB in all of their new macs. Alot of companies that made hardware for the Macs started making products. Some of these companies also made products for PCs, and so they started releasing PC versions. Do you think that it really upset the team at Intel that had worked so hard trying to get companies to accept this standard, got nothing be resistance, then along comes Apple, and witin 6 months, you have a wide range of USB devices?
There was originally talk of including 1394 into the Intel chipsets...never seemed to happen.
But, the biggest backing for 1394 is not computers, though that has helped with its success, but it was the camcorder industry picking 1394 as its way of transfering digital video around that really gave 1394 its biggest initial boost.
Add DV's wild success (even TV stations and movie producers are using them) to the need to have this, and it only made sense to make external harddrives, then CD/DVD burners, etc.
Hitachi if claimed it was going to include 1394 on all of its HD TV sets (I do not know if this ever came to pass). 1394 was even selected as the interconnect standard by the automotive industry.
It is a very robust standard, that didnt oversell itself on its capabilities. It said it could do 100 Mbits/sec, and it did very close (as they had already taken into account some of the overhead).
Anyway, that is my very long winded approach of trying to clear up what Firewire/1394 is.
