Firewire Vs. USB: A Simplified Approach

Firewire
Around 1987, in the research labs of Apple, Firewire was born. At the time, its primary use was to transfer data and connect hard drives inside of the early Macintosh computers, and in turn, reduced the complexity of the cabling inside of them. Seeing the potential of this technology to connect external peripherals, Apple took it to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in hope of making Firewire into an industry standard. Who is the IEEE, they are a group of electrical and electronics engineers who set standards for telecommunications and computing applications.

In 1995, IEEE christened the name IEEE-1394 High-Performance Serial Bus to Firewire and it immediately hit the big market. Boasting a performance rate of 100-megabytes per second, it easily mopped the floor with any competition and became the best in its class. Knowing the value of Firewire, companies such as Microsoft and Intel soon began to use it.

As jealousy is the main downfall for humans, as greed was for Apple's dominance of the serial data bus ports. In 1998, Apple, knowing their position of superiority over many motherboard manufacturers and owning the primary IP for Firewire, began charging a licensing fee of $1 per port—so if a motherboard had 2 Firewire ports, it would have cost an extra $2 to construct. Although this may not seem like a very large amount of money, the electronic industry runs a specific budget for the amount of money spent on component production. For example, if it takes $5 to produce a motherboard and Intel produces 10,000 of them, then their production costs will end up being $50,000. Now under Apple's licensing fee of $1 per port (lets just say the motherboards include two Firewire ports), the production price will be $7 per motherboard ending with a total production cost of $70,000, a $20,000 difference. See how it adds up?

Once this news hit Intel, they quickly abandoned Firewire, switched to Usb 1.1, and began to work on the prototypes of Usb 2.0. Because of Apple's mistake, Firewire shrunk down to Macintosh systems and select computer companies such as Sony who called Firewire the I-Link. But this doesn't mean that Firewire's popularity decreased. In a way, it increased the sales of Macintosh because many of the hardcore media-editing enthusiasts needed a fast Firewire port to connect their DV camcorder or camera to their computer and so they began to choose Mac over Pc.

Yet, recently, Firewire has begun to emerge back onto pc with their newest technology, Firewire 800. Many motherboard companies such as Gigabyte, Asus, FIC, Abit, and ECS support Firewire800 and more are to come. You can also find a large amount of Firewire 800 motherboards here at Directron by using their "search" function on the top right of their page. Just type in Firewire motherboard and you got it! An important fact that you must understand is that IEEE 1394 and Firewire are different names for the same thing. IEEE- 1394B and Firewire 800 are the also referring to the same port but are faster than their predecessor the plain IEEE-1394 (it really becomes a mouthful to say) and Firewire. The FirewareA only supports 400 mbps/second while the newer Fireware 800 supports transfer rates of up to 800 mbps/second.

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