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 Quick Guide To FireWire

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No - it's FireWire! Don your trunks and cape and take a look at this super fast high-speed protocol.

It's all about the need for speed. As computer technology has developed we've seen a startling array of communications protocols, not to mention acronyms - IDE, EIDE, ISA, PCI, AGP ADB, SCSI, USB... Some have a specialist use such as AGP which is for graphics cards, some such as IDE are for hard disks while others like SCSI and USB are designed for a range of devices from hard disks and scanners to mice and keyboards.

FireWire is one of the most recent communications protocols to arrive although it has been around for several years. However, it's only in the last few years that it's been used for MIDI and audio interfaces. It's purpose is quite simple - to transfer data from one device to another, as much of it as possible and as quickly as possible.

Say cheese

FireWire's first claim to fame was for use with DV - Digital Video. It was heavily promoted by Apple a few years ago when Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, was pushing DV as if MGM was going out of business.

DV didn't turn us all into Spielbergs but it did give would-be Tarentinos the opportunity to turn out terrible movies for next to nothing. It also enhanced awareness of the protocol which lead manufacturers to produce all manner of FireWire devices, apart from cameras, such as disk drives, scanners, CD-R drives and printers.

Origin of the species

The origin of FireWire goes back to 1986. It's commonly considered to be an Apple development although some sources attribute it to an inter-company development group whose brief was to develop a superior serial bus. Wherever the original idea came from, there's no doubt that Apple picked up the ball and ran with it. It was standardised in 1995 with the official name of IEEE-1394.

In true Apple style, interest in FireWire was forced upon Mac users. Macs had traditionally used SCSI as a hard drive interface as it was faster than the PC's IDE but in a cost-cutting exercise Apple threw SCSI out the window along with the Apple serial and parallel ports, and in went IDE drives, and USB and FireWire interfaces.

Mac users had to ditch old devices and buy new ones - or convert to the PC, which many did - but the demand for FireWire and USB devices spurred developers into production which undoubtedly helped with the take-up of USB and FireWire on the PC, too.

iLink therefore I Lan

FireWire's first mainstream use was for video and when it was being added to cameras, other companies put their own moniker on it so we have Sony's iLink which is essentially the same protocol. However, iLink only uses four wires, not FireWire's six. The two missing wires are used to carry power so iLink needs to be used with devices which have their own power supply.

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