[X4U] FireWire and low end Macs

[Doug McNutt]

At 23:32 -0600 2/5/09, Ed Gould wrote:
>
>You need firewire.
>

<politics>
Firewire is an Apple invention that became an IEEE standard.

USB is an Intel development that did pretty much the same thing.

Apple had to negotiate a deal with Intel when it changed its source 
of processor chips.

Does anyone believe that the USB-2 vs Firewire option for new Macs 
was not a part of that deal?
</politics>

LVDS - low voltage differential signalling - introduced in chip form 
by National Semiconductor has been widely successful. One can buy 
chip pairs that accept parallel data with a variety of bit counts, 
convert it to two wire twisted pair signals at GigaHz rates and 
recover the parallel data at the destination.

Serial ATA, PCI express, monitor connections, digital TV distribution 
and a whole bunch of other stuff are candidates for that kind of 
connectivity. It may not be long before both USB and Firewire are 
passe.

For now I like SE/30's with their good old RS422 serial ports and 
look forward to a return of SCSI with those 50 pin cables replaced by 
LVDS pairs..

-- 

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