Smart Computing Article - Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers 1394 (IEEE 1394) to International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)

This is the Western Digital Corporation FireWire drive. FireWire technology lets manufacturers produce external storage devices that operate at high speeds and are easy for users to configure. In addition to high speed, IEEE 1394 has other advantages. The IEEE 1394/FireWire cable supports as many as 16 physical connections or hops, letting you connect up to 63 devices 1394 bus. Multiple cable typologies are recognized, and devices plugged into an IEEE 1394/FireWire system are automatically assigned addresses; no reconfiguration required. , the ability to add or remove devices without first powering down the bus, makes it easy to manage peripherals. IEEE 1394/FireWire also supports extensive time-based data, including isochronous data, guaranteed latency and bandwidth, and an accurate submicrosecond time base for synchronizing events and data. This makes IEEE 1394/FireWire a preferred choice for transferring video, audio, or other time-based data. FireWire has an additional claim to fame, an unusual one for an IEEE standard: It won an Emmy from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Apple received the 2001 Primetime Emmy Engineering Award because of the material impact FireWire has had on the television and film industries. In its various incarnations (Apple uses FireWire; Sony uses i.Link; others just call it 1394), IEEE 1394 has become the standard for interconnecting professional and consumer multimedia. It fueled the desktop video revolution by allowing the easy connection of video recorders, camcorders, cameras, and other devices to desktop computers. Apple and IEEE are both working on an improved standard to increase performance of 1394 from a maximum of 400Mbps (393.216) to 800Mbps and beyond. In programming language, an instruction tells a computer processor what to do next. This can be as simple as telling the computer to do nothing (a no-operation instruction), or to perform a specific task, such as adding numbers or