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Comment by aardvark291 | Hacker News Reader

»The G5 has three USB 2 ports, two FireWire 400 ports, and a FireWire 800 port. In my life I have never used FireWire to transfer data. I will probably go to my grave having never used FireWire.«

Same.

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IIRC, there was an interesting article posted here on HN about the history of FireWire. It sounded like an interesting piece of technology, but various circumstances prevented it ever becoming the big success it could have been.

I feel the same thing is repeating with Thunderbolt.

It's kind of funny/sad because neither technology is strictly tied to Apple machines - I had a work laptop (Dell Latitude D630) with a Firewire port. One of our CAD workstations has Thunderbolt on board (but, sadly no actual port).

But there were almost no peripherals to support it. The only person I ever saw using Firewire used it to transfer digital video from their camera to their PC.

It came down to licencing. Apple wanted $1 per port in 1999, which was too expensive. Intel would rather develop their own bus (USB) than licence Firewire from Apple. Apple eventually caved to $0.25 but it was too late.

Firewire was heavily used for digital video, still used for heaps of industrial cameras. Still very prominent in digital audio. The multimaster bus design, guaranteed timing and bandwidth (isochronous transport), and speed, made Firewire a winner. A Firewire 400 drive is practically twice as fast as USB2. So anyone who had to do lots of transfers used it.

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