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Officially known as IEEE 1394, the FireWire standard was developed by Apple in collaboration with other tech companies, including Sony and Panasonic.

And therein lies the problem - two of the most notorious lock-in companies helped develop it.

> Officially known as IEEE 1394, the FireWire standard was developed by Apple in collaboration with other tech companies, including Sony and Panasonic. And therein lies the problem - two of the most notorious lock-in companies helped develop it.

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[–] • 3 pts

Wasn't 1394 out a bit earlier than USB? Specs were also way better, I seem to remember. Higher speed, peer to peer, DMA come to mind.

I think dumb licensing policy is mostly what eventually broke its neck. Also there were security concerns because of DMA attacks, but that could probably have been mitigated.

[–] • 4 pts

Yes. Firewire was released in 1995 and offered a 400mbps peer-to-peer port system. It was developed by Apple and others with roots back into the 80s.

USB1.0 - the original 1.5mbps spec - was released in 1996, with the more familiar USB1.1 being released in 1998.

It was kind of the Beta vs. VHS thing again - Firewire offered better speeds, but USB was more accessible because it's easy to implement as it's a single item on a port. Firewire was a lot more complex being more of a ring network where any device on the bus could talk to any other device on the bus.

Lucent was an early adopter of Firewire - I remember some of the "new" switching cards in the late 90s had a firewire port.