The parallel universe of FireWire hubs
by Cameron Kaiser, Sunday, June 27, 2021
- http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-parallel-universe-of-firewire-hubs.html

"I like FireWire and I still use FireWire (I've even used it to
power a WiFi-to-Ethernet connector on a PowerBook G4), but this is
a retrocomputing blog, and for the larger consumer market IEEE 1394
is now just an odd little niche. Many postmortems have been done on
the death of FireWire and it still pops up in weird places like the
military (see AS5643 and descendants like AIR5654A), low-latency
audio, infotainment systems and some security and monitoring
devices, but I think the biggest thing that doomed it was that it
was perceived as a competitor to USB and failed to sufficiently
differentiate itself. Device manufacturers didn't help: with the
exception of some high-end A/V equipment and tape camcorders, the
same devices (mass storage, webcams, scanners) showed up with USB
ports as did with FireWire ports, and there were many commodity PCs
that lacked FireWire entirely and many devices that were USB-only,
so USB connectivity won out. Licensing costs no doubt played a
major role but market perception greatly hastened the process.
FireWire still has infrastructure advantages in topology, latency
and segment length but it also makes devices more expensive, and
even these points in its favour are outweighed by the comparatively
prodigious peak bandwidth in USB 3 despite FireWire winning the
bandwidth war handily for many years.

One example of this was the parallel universe of FireWire hubs. If
you think of FireWire as "a big USB" then a hub wouldn't seem so
strange, but FireWire was actually meant to replace SCSI. SCSI and
FireWire are peer-to-peer: any device on the bus can talk to any
other device, unlike USB where each bus has at most one host and
the host does all the initiation of data transfer. (USB On-The-Go
still has one host and one host only; it just allows certain
devices like your mobile phone to swing both ways.) The
point-to-point capabilities of USB 3 notwithstanding, a USB hub has
one upstream port for the host and multiple downstream ports for
the devices. A FireWire hub, however, is like getting a longer
internal SCSI cable; more devices simply exist on the same bus.
Connecting multiple FireWire hubs just makes a bigger bus because
all the ports are the same." ...

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