Information AboutFirewire |
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| ieee standards | |
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| personal area networks | |
-style cabling used by 1394c ]] FireWire is 's WiMedia Ultra-Wideband (UWB) standard. Almost all modern digital Camcorder s have included this connection since 1995. Many computers intended for home or professional audio/video use have built-in FireWire ports including all Apple , Sony laptop computers and most Dell and HP models currently produced. It is also widely available on retail motherboards for do-it-yourself PCs, alongside USB . FireWire was used with initial models of Apple's IPod , but later models eliminated FireWire support in favor of USB due to space constraints and for wider Compatibility . HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT FireWire is Apple Inc. 's name for the IEEE 1394 High Speed Serial Bus. It was initiated by Apple and developed by the IEEE P1394 Working Group, largely driven by contributors from Apple, although major contributions were also made by engineers from Texas Instruments , Sony , Digital Equipment Corporation , IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) and INMOS / SGS Thomson (now STMicroelectronics ). Apple intended FireWire to be a serial replacement for the parallel amendment, the IEEE Std. 1394b-2002 amendment, and the IEEE Std. 1394c-2006 amendment. Sony's implementation of the system is known as i.Link, and uses only the four signal pins, discarding the two pins that provide power to the device in favor of a separate power connector on Sony's i.Link products. The system is commonly used for connection of Data Storage Device s and DV (digital video) cameras, but is also popular in industrial systems for Machine Vision and professional audio systems. It is used instead of the more common USB due to its faster effective speed, higher power-distribution capabilities, and because it does not need a computer host. Perhaps more importantly, FireWire makes full use of all SCSI capabilities and, compared to USB 2.0 Hi-Speed, has higher sustained data transfer rates, especially on Apple Mac OS X (with more varied results on Windows, presumably since USB2 is Intel's answer to Firewire on Windows machines)http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htmhttp://www.tomshardware.com/2004/04/02/go_external/, a feature especially important for audio and video editors. However, the small royalty that Apple Inc. and other Patent holders have initially demanded from users of FireWire (US$0.25 per End-user system) and the more expensive hardware needed to implement it (US$1–$2) has prevented FireWire from displacing USB in low-end mass-market computer peripherals where cost of product is a major constraint. According to Michael Johas Teener , original chair and editor of the IEEE 1394 standards document, and technical lead for Apple's FireWire team from 1990 until 1996:
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