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.
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.