Setting world on FireWire By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Columnist, 09/16/99
Most of you have probably never added a new hard drive to your computer. You've missed the joys of untangling ribbon cables, hunting for misplaced mounting screws, resetting your BIOS software. And now there's a good chance you never will.
Instead, you'll go to the store and buy a little hard drive that fits in a shirt pocket. You'll also buy a length of wire only a little thicker than a telephone cord. Then you'll plug one end of the wire into your computer and another into your new drive. And you'll be done. Instant gigabytes.
I'm doing this already, with one of the most impressive new products I've seen this year, a $379, four-gigabyte pocket hard drive from VST Technologies Inc. in Acton. But when I wanted to try out the drive, I had to leave my Pentium II PC behind. I went to the desk of a colleague who uses one of Apple Computer Inc.'s Power Macintosh G3 workstations.
That's because the drive relies on FireWire, a technology developed by Apple and mainly found on its high-end hardware. Work on FireWire began in 1986, but was left to gather dust in the days when the company had other things to worry about - like meeting its payroll.
Restored to rude good health, Apple is confounding skeptics like me by once again rolling out new technologies that are unmatched by their bigger, richer rivals. Their cool gadget of the moment is the new Macintosh G4 workstation, so powerful that national security regulations bar Apple from selling it in a number of countries. Apple's hilarious new ''lethal weapon'' TV ad is not just hype; I confirmed the facts with the US Department of Commerce. My readers from India will be grieved to learn they can't buy a G4 and ship it home without an export license, for fear it might be used to make guided missiles or the like.
But I'm more interested in technologies that make it easier to transmit data over the Net or share it with other electronic devices. Which is why Apple's decision to put FireWire on its G3s, and eventually on all its machines, is my pick for their smartest move yet.
Think of FireWire as the big brother of Universal Serial Bus, or USB. These days many of us have USB keyboards, mice, or printers attached to our computers. USB lets you plug in a device and start using it without rebooting. But it only transmits 12 million bits of data per second. That's more than fast enough for a mouse or keyboard, but inadequate for a high-speed hard drive.
The FireWire port in a G3 can handle 400 million bits of data per second. I was able to copy a 25-megabyte file to the drive in about 12 seconds, and it played full-screen, full-motion videos flawlessly.
You can daisy-chain up to 63 FireWire devices on a single cable. The VST drive comes with two ports, so if you want to add yet another drive, just plug it into the first, and so on. The FireWire system even includes electrical power, so if you use just a few devices, you don't have to plug them into a wall socket - they'll get their electricity from the FireWire. To switch it to another computer, just close any open files, unplug the drive, and go.
It's hard to exaggerate the potential of FireWire, and not just for computers. Nearly every digital camera and camcorder has an ''IEEE 1394'' port - the technical name for FireWire. This means users could connect them to FireWire-equipped computers and create an instant video editing and image storage system. If you want to keep a permanent copy of a favorite TV show, just plug in a FireWire hard drive and store it there.
It's all giving me a bad case of FireWire envy. My iMac doesn't have FireWire, and Apple hasn't announced when it'll add the feature to that popular line of computers. A mere handful of PCs from Sony and Compaq are FireWire-compatible, not including my Compaq PC. Windows 95, 98, and NT don't support it. But the new Windows 98 Special Edition does, and so will Windows 2000. In a year or so, FireWire will be standard on many PCs. But when you start bragging about it, your pal who owns a Power Mac will give you the official Mac-lover's sneer while smugly declaring, ''Apple had it first.'' And your pal will be right.
E-mail Hiawatha Bray at bray@globe.com. This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 09/16/99.
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