[X4U] FireWire and low end Macs

[Ed Gould]

On Feb 6, 2009, at 10:37 AM, Doug McNutt wrote:

> 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..
>
>

IMO it is a combination of plug & play & firewire (for the most part)  
but the other part is ease and speed. I used to own a PC that had  
SCSI exclusively and it was not a pretty picture to add drives to it  
(IMO). I had a CDROM and an external HD both running through SCSI and  
it was a pure night mare getting those two added on. I was able to  
take out and install a power supply in less than 30 minutes on the PC  
the HD and CDROM were hours of effort and lots of calls to my local  
SCSI expert (free) in order to get them to even work. Sorry SCSI is  
OK if you do not want to add anything to it.
Ed