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.
Everything you ever wanted to know about FireWire hubs, with lots of examples.
Firewire was pretty much impossible on a PC.
I remember searching for an external HDD solution during the eSATA days., The USB 3 was new and unreliable, and eSATA was (usually) limited to SATA 2 speeds.
However even after spending time searching for it, I could not find a good motherboard with built in Firewire ports. And Firewire add-in cards had all sorts of issues mentioned on their Amazon product pages, which led me to stay away from this technology.
For some reason PC manufacturers were never on board with this technology. Even during the times of USB2 where ExpressCard was the only viable option for high speed laptop expansions, I don’t remember seeing them often. They stayed primarily a Mac option.
(I actually had one such port… on my sound blaster card, which only worked with other audio devices).
If I remember, Firewire was pretty much backed by Apple and wanted it as an exclusivity for their computer for AV editing. Hence the licensing scheme was rather hard to get through and democratize the technology. I have a Mini-ITX Jetway J7F2 motherboard (https://www.jetwaycomputer.com/J7F2.html) that feature an IEEE1394 port, yet never used it though. Too few devices available, or too expensive. USB3 rules now.
It was great for video editing, yes, but another key thing for Apple was the iPod. At the time, transferring music from a PC to any music player was a slow business using USB 1, or even worse. Seeing a Mac sync music to an iPod using Firewire in those days was like a dream in comparison. Such a setup was far beyond my price range at the time though, so I stuck with real-time music transfers with TOSLink and my trusty MiniDisc player…
I have had a couple of motherboards with Firewire built in, and PCI cards were easy enough to find. I’ve used both, and never had an issue with either (well, other than no drivers being available for the PCI card when I moved to Windows 7). Not that I used it much – for me it was essentially used as an alternative to USB. I had a few hard drives with Firewire connection and even a printer, which I still have and use albeit over USB these days.
I much preferred the feel of the connectors, the easy visual cues for orientation meant no faffing to see which way around the plug goes, and they had a less fragile feel than the USB counterparts. I always wondered why USB didn’t do something similar…
We might have checked Firewire availability at different times (or different price ranges).
Anyway, with USB3/Thunderbolt, the only holdout is the iphone. Any other device (PC, phone, laptop, tablet, screen, etc) can use the type-c port (at least via an adapter).
But that comes with new issues (will my cable carry video and power at the same time? Will this type-c monitor work with an HDMI adapter? which port on my laptop is better for charging?)
FireWire never caught up because the IP for USB was easier to integrate in most chipsets, whereas I believe most FireWire implementation ended up having their own discrete controller. Which added another chip to the BOM. One of the main value propositions for FireWire was it’s power delivery, which again increased the cost of the board’s design as you needed to support the power delivery in the traces, PMICs etc. Which again added cost.
Only a few peripherals ended up supporting FW. Mainly external drives and cameras. So there was little demand.,
Apple could afford to include FW in their systems because they never target low margin markets. Whereas most PCs, specially in that era, were competing very aggressively on margins. So anything that added to cost was eliminated or not included if possible.
It’s a pity because it was an interesting bus technology, but by the time USB 2 was out, there was little value added. Even Apple gave up on it by then.