Target disk mode over FireWire was magical back in the day. Nothing like turning someone’s laptop into an oversized external hard drive to rescue data or get a borked OS X installation booting again.
Thunderbolt was also expensive, which is why adoption was limited, but it's becoming more maisntream since Intel and Apple have been pushing it in the last years, adn piggibacking over USB-C makes it an easy sell comapred to requireing a separate connector like firewire.
Still, thunderbolt peripherals are way more expensive than USB ones, so like Firewire before, use is still more in the enthusianst/professional space.
Compared to Gigabit Ethernet back in that time period? Firewire was a huge bargain.
Completely loading a 5 Gig iPod with music over that first version of Firewire still took a few minutes.
Yes and? At what price points? What was the adoption rate? How many mainstream PCs and peripherals worldwide had it?
Wherever you went, whoever you met, you were way more likely to find a USB or ethernet port to hook up for a fast transfer rather than Firewire.
At least in my country at the time, maybe you lived in Cupertino/Palo Alto where evryone had iMacs and firewire.
Just like VHS over Betamax, USB won because it was cheaper and more convenient despite technically inferior to firewire and consumer tewch at the time was a race to the bottom in terms of price.
>Completely loading a 5 Gig iPod with music over that first version of Firewire still took a few minutes.
Only the first gen iPod had firewire before switching to USB, and even then, what was the point of Firewire 400 on it when the tiny and slow mechanical HDD on it was the real bottleneck.
There was no way the iPod would have been remotely as successful had it stayed on firewire. Apple didn't have the market sahre back then to enforce their own less popular standard. Only when it switched to USB and supporting PCs did the iPod really take off.
At the time, USB was still limited to 12 megabits per second and transferring that same 5 Gigs of MP3 files would have taken over an hour. The firewire iPod did it in a couple of minutes.
USB was cheaper, but dog slow.
Gigabit Ethernet was faster but WAY more expensive.
Again, only the first gen iPod was firewire exclusive and it was not yet a maisntream product since it was still Mac only, so avergae consumer demand at home computers for Firewire was lackluster and the iPod didn't change that.
Firewire was niche or non existent in the home PC space and it died completley with the launch of USB 2.0 remaining alive only in the pro-sumer space.
>Gigabit Ethernet was faster but WAY more expensive.
Please show me where I mentioned Gigabit ethernet as an argument. I said 100 Ethernet which was dirt cheap and almost every PC and Mac had it, as opposed to Firewire, so if you needed a fast cross platform transfer it was your best bet at the time in terms of cost and mass availability over firewire before USB 2.0 and gigabit hit the market.
Which completely ignores the speed and the costs of the various data transfer standards as they existed at the time.
The cheap 1.2 megabit USB standard that existed at the time couldn't transfer 5 Gigs of MP3 files in less than an hour.
The cheaper 10 megabit version of Ethernet they sold at the time also would need more than a hour to transfer enough MP3 files to fill an iPod and wouldn't have been cheaper than a Firewire port.
Ethernet with faster speeds than 400 megabit Firewire existed, but was MUCH more expensive.
Speed AND cost both matter.
> I said 100 Ethernet which was dirt cheap
Back then? It wasn't.
The low cost is price. Asus for example with their ASUS ThunderboltEX 4 allows you to have TB4 via PCIe card.
The neat thing about USB4 was same as PATA and later SATA: widely and relatively cheap available in consumer hardware. SCSI and FireWire were technically superior but were neither cheap nor widely available.
Oh and I don't know about SCSI but FireWire was actually a security risk.
Luckily there are good alternatives. I landed on a solution using a Belkin[0] DisplayPort and USB to Thunderbolt-cable. I just get USB2.0 speeds, but it's enough for my needs. I'm also able to extend it using an active DisplayPort 1.4 extender, for a total of 10 meters cable.
[0] https://www.belkin.com/support-article/?articleNum=316883
FireWire at 800Mbps beat Gigabit Ethernet in terms of latency for a rather hard real-time system.