Wired - At one point during last October's introduction of the latest MacBook laptop, Steve Jobs made a telling remark: "We are just as proud of things we leave out." He was talking about toxic chemicals. But when the MacBook's specs were detailed later that day, it became clear that Apple had left something else out that customers would be less happy to lose: the FireWire port.
Can I shed some eye water here over the demise of FireWire—aka the IEEE 1394 interface? Introduced in 1995, it was touted as a panacea, speedily transferring information to and from gear like disc drives, other computers, and especially video cameras. Coming after the madness of the SCSI ("scuzzy") system, with bulky sockets called terminators and cables so thick they could hold up bridges, FireWire was a godsend. It even won an Emmy.
Losing FireWire got me thinking about all the ports and standards that have vanished over the years, leaving behind a trail of memories and a dumpster's worth of orphaned peripherals. Our pop-in wires now transmit megabytes in seconds, but there's a buggy-whip-style frisson in recalling the feel of ridged plastic on your fingertips as you screwed in the socket of an RS-232
Connector. Where are all those old RS-232s today? In my basement, probably.
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