Memories of Firewire
During spring cleaning aka "the great nesting" I dealt with a tangle of wires occupying half the dining room table. It's now been broken up into categories and mostly stored. One pile entering permastorage is the pile of Firewire-cables. I had about a DOZEN Firewire-cables in there. I am down to ONE device that uses Firewire - my studio sound card. I shall now reminisce about how fucking awesome Firewire was when it came out.
I had two very serious holy shit moments with Firewire.
My first encounter with Firewire was on my dad's new CRT iMac (G3, purple, think 1999 model). We didn't really have anything that connected to it. But DMA got a digital video camera in the summer of 2000, with a Firewire port. And my dad's computer had iMovie. It is almost impossible to convey how absolutely fucking mindblowing it was to stream your video from the player to the mac, edit it using this super easy-to-use piece of software, and then stream it back for storing. Now we totally take this for granted, of course, but it really was insane. We made movies that whole summer. We'd stay up until 4 in the morning tweaking cross-scene fades and adding soundtracks / effects. Firewire, camera, and iMovie made it possible to work in this way we hadn't even dreamed was possible until we saw it.
My second encounter was when I got the first generation iPod. This one actually had a Firefire connector in it, and held a whopping 5GB of music. It was nuts - that was a significant portion of your entire harddrive. What was even more nuts was plugging it in - the whole thing was filled in about 5 minutes. Sometimes technology bypasses your rational thinking and you're just gawking and thinking "what is this sorcery".
USB didn't catch up to Firewire until USB 3.0, which didn't really start showing up in commodity machines until 10 years after Firewire was introduced. Of course, FW has more complex and expensive controller chips, and since everything is moving to miniaturization there's not much need for it anymore. I still like it in the soundcard, since the latency is stupid low (I get 2ms response without stuttering, which is just crazy).
I'm holding on to this thing until I get a computer without a Firewire port, then it goes on the legacy pile. All things considered I'm kind of glad things are standardizing, though - most of my stuff now is USB or HDMI. We have like ONE Ethernet cable connected to the router, and some displayport adapters.
I had two very serious holy shit moments with Firewire.
My first encounter with Firewire was on my dad's new CRT iMac (G3, purple, think 1999 model). We didn't really have anything that connected to it. But DMA got a digital video camera in the summer of 2000, with a Firewire port. And my dad's computer had iMovie. It is almost impossible to convey how absolutely fucking mindblowing it was to stream your video from the player to the mac, edit it using this super easy-to-use piece of software, and then stream it back for storing. Now we totally take this for granted, of course, but it really was insane. We made movies that whole summer. We'd stay up until 4 in the morning tweaking cross-scene fades and adding soundtracks / effects. Firewire, camera, and iMovie made it possible to work in this way we hadn't even dreamed was possible until we saw it.
My second encounter was when I got the first generation iPod. This one actually had a Firefire connector in it, and held a whopping 5GB of music. It was nuts - that was a significant portion of your entire harddrive. What was even more nuts was plugging it in - the whole thing was filled in about 5 minutes. Sometimes technology bypasses your rational thinking and you're just gawking and thinking "what is this sorcery".
USB didn't catch up to Firewire until USB 3.0, which didn't really start showing up in commodity machines until 10 years after Firewire was introduced. Of course, FW has more complex and expensive controller chips, and since everything is moving to miniaturization there's not much need for it anymore. I still like it in the soundcard, since the latency is stupid low (I get 2ms response without stuttering, which is just crazy).
I'm holding on to this thing until I get a computer without a Firewire port, then it goes on the legacy pile. All things considered I'm kind of glad things are standardizing, though - most of my stuff now is USB or HDMI. We have like ONE Ethernet cable connected to the router, and some displayport adapters.