Lab10.4 USB versus FireWire
Why, when both the USB and FireWire technologies were introduced,
did the industry choose USB over FireWire?
-The industry chose USB over FireWire because of three things.
1. Apple demanded a license fee of few dollars for each PC, which wasn't, economically, able to be maintained. So USB had a chance and had no license fee. Apple dropped the license fee to $0.25 but their former license fee dealt enough damage.
2. Firewire implementations required 5V chips, which was okay for desktop PC's but not for 3.3v laptops. Plus, the FireWire chips would be more expensive to produce as chip die sizes got smaller. Even if the future higher-speed FireWire standard will be a lower-power, lower-voltage implementation, the damage was enough.
3. The first Fire Wire chips produced by Adaptec and Texas Instruments had a lot of problems. Unlike USB 1.1 which had no problems whatsover, just the lack of speed. However, USB 2.0 changed the problem and had increased its speed to match FireWire, with up to 127 devices supported AT ONCE with cable lengths up to 5 meters.
In conclusion, FireWire blew its chance to become big and USB continued to be more popular.
23
