"The S3200 standard will sustain the position of IEEE 1394 as the absolute performance leader..."
James Snider, 1394 Trade Association
During the mid-1980s, engineers at Apple, Inc., began working on a new, high-speed data transfer medium to exchange large amounts of data on computers. They dubbed this technology "FireWire"in view of the increased speed, and released it in 1995.
Apple's engineers produced their first specification sheet for the setup in 1987. The company realized that USB devices were fine for keyboards and mice, but faster speeds were required for high-memory applications, such as video cameras, which had many gigabytes of data to be exchanged. They approached the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) with the intention of making the technology the standard for all computers, both Macintosh and Windows-based, which the IEEE endorsed in 1995.
The first instance of the interface system was called IEEE 1394 and had data exchange speeds almost forty times that of existing USB speeds. From conception, however, the technology was constructed for large packets of data rather than smaller devices such as keyboards, and so the formats rarely competed.
In 2002 IEEE 1394b doubled existing FireWire speeds and increased the distance over which it could be used. In 2008, the 1394 Trade Association announced a new version known as S3200, which will quadruple the speed of the current format.
