FireWire Finally Comes Home

117 Standards I n February 1997, I wrote a Computer column titled " Linking Computers and Consumer Electronics, " which described the IEEE 1394 networking standard, otherwise known as FireWire. FireWire was designed to link personal computers, digital cameras , televisions, DVD players, printers, and other home electronics equipment. In one sense, FireWire represented the technology behind all the talk we've heard about convergence because it promised a wide range of consumer-electronics connectivity from a single plug on the back of a computer. Because FireWire included power, it also promised to enable the development of low-power devices that did not need any external power supplies, which meant that FireWire's potential as the convergence fostering technology was vast. Indeed, FireWire seemed like a perfect idea whose time had come, but there was one small problem: A competing technology , called Universal Serial Bus (USB), promised to do nearly the same thing. Like FireWire, USB (http://www.usb. org) can connect multiple peripherals to a single port on the back of our computers. But USB is designed to be a simpler, slower interface that is less expensive to manufacture. USB only offers a 12-Mbps transfer rate. Compared to FireWire's transfer rates of up to 400 Mbps—and eventually even 1 Gbps—USB is slow but is more than adequate for many consumer applications like videoconferenc-ing or high-fidelity audio. And USB adds very little to system cost, which explains why it has been so readily adopted. Because both technologies arrived at about the same time, hardware and software vendors had to make a choice as to which technology to develop and support. USB got the nod in the Wintel world—with Windows driver support for USB peripherals as early as October 1996—but it wasn't until Windows 98 that consumers got full OS support for USB. Early support on the Wintel platform , however, could account for the large number of USB components that have been popping up over the past two years, such as speakers, joysticks, printers , video cameras, and the like, all of which have made it to market much more quickly than FireWire-based technologies. And now—since the middle of 1998— very few new computers are being manufactured without USB. The Apple iMac, for example, relies on USB as the com-puter's primary connection to its keyboard and other peripherals, including floppy disk, scanner, printer, removable hard disks, and joysticks (http://www. apple.com/imac/usb1.html). The iMac reliance on USB …