Firewire - History and Development

History and Development

FireWire is Apple's name for the IEEE 1394 High Speed Serial Bus. It was initiated by Apple (in 1986) and developed by the IEEE P1394 Working Group, largely driven by contributions from Apple, although major contributions were also made by engineers from Texas Instruments, Sony, Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM, and INMOS/SGS Thomson (now STMicroelectronics).

IEEE 1394 is a serial bus architecture for high-speed data transfer. FireWire is a serial bus, meaning that information is transferred one bit at a time. Parallel buses utilize a number of different physical connections, and as such are usually much less efficient, more costly, and typically heavier. IEEE 1394 fully supports both isochronous and asynchronous applications.

Apple intended FireWire to be a serial replacement for the parallel SCSI bus while providing connectivity for digital audio and video equipment. Apple's development began in the late 1980s, later presented to the IEEE, and was completed in 1995. In 2007, IEEE 1394 was a composite of four documents: the original IEEE Std. 1394-1995, the IEEE Std. 1394a-2000 amendment, the IEEE Std. 1394b-2002 amendment, and the IEEE Std. 1394c-2006 amendment. On June 12, 2008, all these amendments as well as errata and some technical updates were incorporated into a superseding standard, IEEE Std. 1394-2008.

Apple's internal long-time code-name for FireWire was "Chefcat" starting in 1988 as the team sat around a conference table contemplating what to call the project and staring at Kliban's famous artwork on Michael Johas Teener's coffee mug. That was the "aha" moment articulating the goals of the new interconnect, at low cost and ultimate simplicity presented to the user to replace and unify all other PC interconnections and expand beyond that base to enable ultimate miniaturization of electronics. The concept of the current loop electronics that became the now pervasive LVDS was code named "Greyhound" around 1992.

Sony's implementation of the system, "i.LINK", used a smaller connector with only the four signal conductors, omitting the two conductors which provide power to the device in favor of a separate power connector. This style was later added into the 1394a amendment. This port is sometimes labeled "S100" or "S400" to indicate speed in Mbit/s.

The system is commonly used for connection of data storage devices and DV (digital video) cameras, but is also popular in industrial systems for machine vision and professional audio systems. It is preferred over the more common USB for its greater effective speed and power distribution capabilities. Perhaps more important, FireWire uses all SCSI capabilities and has high sustained data transfer rates, important for audio and video editors. Benchmarks show that the sustained data transfer rates are higher for FireWire than for USB 2.0, but lower than USB 3.0. Results are marked on Apple Mac OS X but more varied on Microsoft Windows.