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The ins and outs of USB (IBM developerWorks)The ins and outs of USB (IBM developerWorks)Posted Apr 29, 2005 11:56 UTC (Fri) by Incabulos (guest, #29637)In reply to: The ins and outs of USB (IBM developerWorks) by njhurst Parent article: The ins and outs of USB (IBM developerWorks)
I take it you have not come across firewire devices? I was using an external 200GB harddisk and dvd/rw drive under Linux today, both of which are firewire drives. Even on a distribution as old as RedHat9 it was a matter of plugging it in, fdisking the new /dev/sd* device that appeared, running mkfs, and it was good to go, looking for all the world like a local SCSI disk. If only everything was so simple.
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The ins and outs of USB (IBM developerWorks) Posted Apr 29, 2005 12:50 UTC (Fri) by njhurst (guest, #6022) [Link] I'm sorry, I don't understand what this has to do with my question? I was merely pointing out that firewire, which is superior in every(?) respect is almost a dead standard, only holding out in the top end (much like scsi). Why can't I buy a 4GB/s optical firewire drive to go in my desktop case, plugging straight into the firewire port on the mobo? Instead we have USB, USB 2, SATA, PCI-E etc. Technical merit is clearly not the main factor in USB's acceptance (I suspect that Intel being piggy is more to do with it?).
I certainly have used firewire devices, Indeed I was one of the first users of firewire storage (having an early firewire apple machine running linux/ppc).
The ins and outs of USB (IBM developerWorks) Posted Apr 29, 2005 15:44 UTC (Fri) by kakareka (subscriber, #5204) [Link] IIRC, around the time firewire had become an IEEE standard and was gaining acceptance, Apple decided to announce it was going to charge royalty fees for its use. Intel and other manufacturers were rather upset over that and decided to throw their support to USB2 instead. At that time, I believe pratical implementations of firewire offered significantly less bandwidth than what it theoretically could achieve, and not much higher than what USB2 was going to deliver. Apple rescinded the royalty fees (or dropped them down pretty significantly) a few months later, but the damage was done.
As for the various bus types, they generally target different markets/apps. For instance, AFAIK, PCI-E is really intended for board-board connections rather than cable connections. It really isn't a competitor to firewire although things like hard drives bridge the gap. SATA is designed for internal devices, so has much shorter cable lengths which means a lot for the electrical design (rise/fall times, propagation delays,etc).
John
The ins and outs of USB (IBM developerWorks) Posted Apr 29, 2005 18:11 UTC (Fri) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] The premise of your post is incorrect. Apple never did and never could charge royalties on the use or implementation of the IEEE 1394 bus. What it proposed was to charge royalties on their trademarks, the FireWire name and logo. I believe the proposed charge was $1 per device.
The ins and outs of USB (IBM developerWorks) Posted Apr 29, 2005 18:42 UTC (Fri) by kakareka (subscriber, #5204) [Link] Doing a quick google search does seem to confirm it was a patent issue, not a trademark one. Apple does own patents on the technology, and you can have patents (and charge royalties) on technology included in IEEE standards. Appears other companies claimed patents as well, and forced Apple to agree to cross license, which is what I believe usually happens with IEEE (and other organizations) standards anyway.
The ins and outs of USB (IBM developerWorks) Posted Apr 29, 2005 18:51 UTC (Fri) by maxmtl2002 (guest, #3990) [Link] For the 1394 licensing thing:
Referred from one of the main 1394 site:
Looks like the patents cost are US$ 0.25 for each device. I do not know about its historic values.
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