Introduction

The FireWire DV 800 Kit from Trust contains an IEEE 1394b card with TI chipset; a 1394b cable is, however, not included in delivery

Introduced in 1998, the IEEE1394 desktop bus with a gross throughput of 400 MBit/s (S400), which bears the marketing name of FireWire at Apple and i.Link at SONY, was far and away the fastest serial transmission technology in the market. The speed advantage over Version 1.1 of the Universal Serial Bus (USB), which only manages 12 MBit/s, is enormous, and because the 1394 bus can also transmit data isochronously and is still peer-to-peer-capable, this interface was long seen as the be-all and end-all in broadband audio and video transmission in both private and professional AV production environments and was already considered the ultimate transmission standard for multimedia home networking.

If Apple had not danced rings around hardware producers in 1999 - above all Intel - with totally exaggerated license fees of $1 per port, IEEE1394 would today be a fixed component of Intel chipsets. The 440JX with 1394 integrated in the Southbridge was already ready in 1999 but was never marketed. Even Apple reduced the license demands to 25 cents per device. Instead, the Santa Clara-based leader in computer chips decided to further develop the slow 12 MBit/s USB 1.1 into its own serial high-speed bus. USB 2.0, which reaches a nominal 480 MBit/s gross throughput, has for months been a basic feature of the latest PCs and peripherals.