FireWire: Apple's Lost Cable

A Green Card With Three Odd Ports

Among the cards in the haul from the Stockholm TV studio is a plain green circuit board with a long gold edge connector, the kind that fits a PCI-X slot, an old wide slot from servers and workstations of the early 2000s. On the board sits a square chip with a Texas Instruments logo and the code TSB82AA2. At the edge are three small connectors that no current computer has.

That chip is a FireWire 800 controller. The card gave a computer three ports of a connection standard that, for about a decade, was the backbone of every video edit suite, every music studio, and every hobbyist with a digital camcorder. Then, slowly and then all at once, it vanished. Today most people under 30 have never seen one.

This episode is the story of FireWire. How Apple invented something genuinely better than its rival, why it lost anyway, what it was like to work with it, and why a card like this one might still have a very specific job in a village in Jämtland.

Born in Cupertino

In the late 1980s, engineers at Apple started working on a new way to connect devices to computers. At the time, connecting things was miserable. Hard drives used SCSI, which meant thick cables, chunky connectors, and a thing called termination, where the last device in the chain needed a special plug, and if you got it wrong nothing worked. Every kind of device had its own connector.

Apple's idea was a fast serial bus. A thin cable, hot-pluggable, meaning you could connect and disconnect without restarting. Devices could be chained one after another. And crucially, it could carry time-sensitive data, like audio and video, with guaranteed timing. Apple called it FireWire. The work became an official industry standard in 1995, with the less poetic name IEEE 1394.

The first version ran at 400 megabits per second. To put that in context, the USB standard that arrived a year later ran at 12. FireWire was more than thirty times faster.

Other companies adopted it under their own names, because Apple owned the FireWire trademark. Sony called it i.LINK and put it on its camcorders. Texas Instruments, the maker of that chip on the green card, became one of the main manufacturers of FireWire controller chips. For a while it looked like the future.

The Thing FireWire Was Brilliant At

To understand why video people loved FireWire, you need two technical ideas, both quite simple.

The first is called isochronous transfer. The word means equal time. A normal connection sends data in bursts when it can, which is fine for copying files. But video is a stream. If a camcorder is sending you 25 frames a second, those frames must arrive on time, every time, or the picture stutters. FireWire could reserve a guaranteed slice of its bandwidth for a stream, so the video always got through, regardless of what else was happening on the cable.

The second idea is that FireWire was peer to peer. With USB, there is always a boss, the computer, and everything else is a servant that speaks only when spoken to. With FireWire, devices could talk directly to each other. Two camcorders could copy tape between them with no computer at all. A hard drive could stream to a deck.

Combine those two ideas and you get the format that made home video editing possible. In the mid 1990s, a group of manufacturers created the DV format, digital video on small cassettes. A DV camcorder recorded about 25 megabits per second of video, and FireWire could carry it perfectly. You plugged the camera into a computer with one thin cable, pressed play, and the computer captured the video bit for bit, no quality loss, no expensive capture hardware.

Before that, getting video into a computer meant a capture card that cost more than the computer. After that, it meant a cable.

Apple built its whole consumer strategy around this. In 1999 it introduced iMovie and put FireWire on its iMacs. The idea that anyone with a camcorder could edit their own films on a home computer was genuinely new, and FireWire made it work. Final Cut Pro, released the same year, did the same for professionals. Small production companies, local TV stations and documentary makers all over the world cut on Macs with FireWire decks and FireWire drives.

Why the Faster Thing Lost

So if FireWire was faster and smarter, why does every computer today have USB instead?

Part of the answer is money. FireWire controller chips were more complex and more expensive than USB chips. And there was a licensing issue. Apple, along with other patent holders, charged a fee for implementing FireWire. The story repeated for years is that Apple asked for one dollar per port. Whatever the exact figures, the perception among PC makers was that FireWire cost extra and came with strings attached. Intel, the company behind USB, had every reason to push its own free alternative instead, and Intel controlled the chipsets in most PCs.

Part of the answer is what most people needed. A mouse, a keyboard, a printer and a scanner do not need 400 megabits per second. USB was cheap and good enough, and good enough tends to win in mass markets.

And then USB got faster. USB 2.0 arrived around 2000 at 480 megabits per second, on paper faster than the original FireWire. In practice FireWire often performed better for sustained transfers, because of how efficiently it used its bandwidth, and video people knew it. But on the box, 480 was bigger than 400, and the box is what sells.

The most symbolic moment came with the iPod. The first iPod in 2001 used FireWire only. It synced a whole music library in minutes, which was part of its magic. But iPods were also being sold to Windows users, and most Windows PCs did not have FireWire. Within a couple of years, Apple added USB support to the iPod, and then dropped FireWire from it entirely. When Apple itself abandons your format on its most popular product, the writing is on the wall.

FireWire 800 and the Last Golden Years

FireWire did get a second act. In 2003, Apple shipped FireWire 800, the 1394b standard, with a new rectangular connector and double the speed. That is what the green card in the haul is. The Power Mac G4 and G5, and later the Mac Pro, had FireWire 800 ports, and for professional video and audio, this was the golden age. Drives daisy-chained behind each other. Audio interfaces for music studios. Capture decks. A professional edit suite in 2006 was a tower Mac surrounded by FireWire 800 drives with blinking lights.

There was also a beloved Mac feature called Target Disk Mode. Hold down the T key while starting a Mac, connect it to another Mac with a FireWire cable, and the first Mac appeared as a plain external hard drive on the second. For moving data, rescuing a broken machine or setting up a new one, it was magic. Every Mac technician of that era has a story about Target Disk Mode saving the day.

The end began in 2008, when Apple released a new aluminium MacBook with no FireWire port at all. People who used their laptops with DV cameras or audio interfaces were furious. Apple partly backed down and put the port back on later models, but the direction was clear. In 2011 Apple and Intel introduced Thunderbolt, which was faster than anything before it, and FireWire became something you connected through an adapter. Over the following years, ports disappeared machine by machine, and in recent years even software support has been fading. Operating systems that once treated FireWire as a core feature have been quietly dropping it.

The Tapes in the Drawers

Here is why that matters, and why a FireWire card in a village in Jämtland is not entirely a joke.

Between roughly 1996 and 2010, millions of families recorded their lives on MiniDV tapes. Christmas mornings. Children learning to walk. Midsommar dances. Weddings. Those little cassettes sit in drawers all over Sweden right now. And the only good way to get them off the tape and into a computer, losslessly, as the original digital files, is FireWire. A camcorder or deck plugged into a FireWire port, a capture program, and real time playback.

As computers lose FireWire, that becomes harder every year. You need an old machine with the right port, the right operating system and the right software, and a working camera or deck, because the tapes themselves are not getting younger either. Magnetic tape degrades. There is a slowly closing window.

So a FireWire 800 card, a couple of old tower Macs and a little patience add up to something real. A digitising station. The kind of thing a local museum, a hembygdsförening or a byalag could offer. Bring your tapes, get your memories back as files. In a village of 120 people, the archive of the last 25 years of local life may well exist mostly on tapes nobody can currently play. Somebody with the right old cable can rescue it.

One practical note for when the card comes out of the car. It has a PCI-X connector, not PCI Express. PCI-X was used in servers and in the Power Mac G5, but it does not fit the PCI Express slots in a Mac Pro or a modern PC. The Mac Pros in the haul likely already have FireWire 800 ports built into the back, so the card may be more of a museum piece than a necessity. But it is a lovely museum piece, a reminder of a time when Apple built a cable that was better than the one that won.

FireWire lost the market. It never lost the argument. Ask anyone who edited video in 2005 and they will tell you the same thing. It just worked, it never dropped a frame, and nothing that came after felt quite as solid.