> Firewire was better

Firewire was faster but it wasn't better. It could only handle the minority usages (external storage), but not the majority ones (mice & keyboard - which were always wired back then).

Firewire also had hellish compatibility, whereas things like USB HID was amazingly plug & play in an era where that really didn't exist. And early on in Firewire's life it made the mistake of changing physical connector and not being backwards compatible.

> Firewire was faster but it wasn't better. It could only handle the minority usages (external storage), but not the majority ones (mice & keyboard - which were always wired back then).

I'm not sure why you say it could not handle mice and keyboards - pretty sure it could but just were never used for it due to license costs.

> Firewire also had hellish compatibility, whereas things like USB HID was amazingly plug & play in an era where that really didn't exist. And early on in Firewire's life it made the mistake of changing physical connector and not being backwards compatible.

I never experienced compatibility issues with it. The S800 standard was backwards compatible, sure they used different connectors but you could have passive cable that converted S800 port to S400 and plug that into a computer that only supported S400.

FireWire wasn't trying to support mice and keyboards. Nor was it trying to be all things to all users. It was trying to be an ultra-fast interface. And FireWire absolutely was backwards-compatible with an adapter. Still is. I never had any compatibility issues with FireWire.

Can you expand on that? IIRC it's not that simple, there are trade-offs for both solutions. Quoting wikipedia's Firewire article:

>USB requires the presence of a bus master, typically a PC, which connects point to point with the USB slave. This allows for simpler (and lower-cost) peripherals, at the cost of lowered functionality of the bus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394#Comparison_with_USB

In the beginning, USB1/2 vs Firewire was a much clearer comparison.

Firewire could power a 2.5" spinning hard disk. (usb could not provide enough power)

You could hook two macs together with firewire, and turn one into a hard disk via target disk mode. (peer to peer)

Firewire could transfer video from cameras without dropping frames. (guaranteed bandwidth)

On the other hand, USB was always the cost king.

I believe there was a $1/chip royalty for firewire, and that limited its growth.

USB in practical terms has caught up.

The other difference was the Firewire did a lot more in that chip, basically offloading a lot of work from the CPU, so it was higher-performing and lower CPU usage.

USB was made mostly by Intel, and they intentionally made it "dumb" so that the CPU had more work to do, in order to push high-performance CPU chips. But of course, the big factor was that license cost, which made Firewire devices cost more, whereas USB was very cheap to implement.

Firewire sucked for simple low bandwidth devices like mice and keyboards though. Even though the connectors were about the same size it really was quite different from USB. Firewire was mostly about bulk data transfer and streaming. It was much more specialized than USB, and it's really not a surprise that it died off once USB got fast enough to do the same streaming, even if it wasn't as good at it.

> Firewire sucked for simple low bandwidth devices like mice and keyboards though.

Did it? I know it was not used for it but I think this was more because of the patent license cost and the relatively low cost of mice and keyboards which made the license cost of $1 a big chunk of the total cost.

> It was much more specialized than USB

Not sure what you mean by this, if you mean less mainstream, yes it was less mainstream, still better. Support for DMA, memory mapped devices, daisy-chaining, peer to peer. It really was revolutionary and still is.

There aforementioned PCI-Express is to some extent feels like "Firewire done right", mainly because the frame formats are strikingly similar. On the other hand, Firewire, like pre-3.0 USB, is not truly packed-switched, but uses shared bus with TDMA-ish timeslots (and the whole mechanism of arbitration and root-election is hellishly complex).