| Monday, June 3, 2002 |
14:29 - Can I yell "FireWire" in a crowded convention hall?
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=497
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Manufacturers are already gearing up for 800Mbps FireWire enclosures at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, where FireWire is very big and buzzwordy these days. Apparently they've got a whole "FireWire Hall" for showcasing devices which take advantage of it, which include optical drives that use actual FireWire transport instead of just IDE transport with a FireWire bridge. That should really make this stuff fly.
They're also doing things like making controller chips which merge FireWire (in both 400 and 800 Mbps flavors) and USB (1 and 2) onto a single bridge. (They're calling it "SuperWire".
Sounds to me like FireWire does still have a whole lot of momentum, and it's in fact gaining. That's good to hear.
A few days ago, Chris discovered with wide-eyed awe how you could hold down "T" while booting up your iBook, and it would come up in FireWire disk mode-- just plug it in to another machine via a FireWire cable, and you can access its disks over the FireWire bus. This isn't a Mac-only thing either-- Lance's Toshiba laptop will do it too. But this is a perfect example of what I mean when I say FireWire is so much more than just a USB-esque transport protocol; people want to destroy it just because it's not favored by Microsoft and Intel, but to do so would be to demolish a great beauty out of spite. "If we can't have it, then nobody else can either!"
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