IIRC it was $1 per 'Firewire' port in licensing costs alone, which might make a big difference on a less expensive device with smaller margins, especially when there are other options that are cheaper or free. I think they settled on $0.25 per port or something, but not before the 1394b standard got rolling to provide the same functionality in a different and unrestricted way. Anyone with more hard info? The above is just unreliable rememberance. Troy "These strokes aren't so bad. I clearly remember things now that I know I never did." - Roy Johnson >>> dopp at acm.cs.umn.edu 04/27/01 11:34AM >>> It has somehting to do with licensing. Apple makes people pay them a dollar ($1) to license USB. Apple's intent was to make it _really_ cheap, which they did, but I think many people took it as an insult. They wonder why Apple would charge a dollar when they could just give it away for free, since that $1/license adds .000000000000000000000000000000001% to there revenue... Gabe > Just a random thought: Why has USB (12 Mbps) been so successful while > FireWire (400+ Mbps) has been very slowly adopted? Heck, I never even > heard of USB until I saw it on a motherboard, while FireWire had been > discussed in the trade press for years beforehand. Was there something to > do with licensing? Standards? Just the fact that Apple was a principal > character in FireWire? > -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gabe Turner | X-President, UNIX Systems Administrator, | Assoc. for Computing Machinery U of M Supercomputing Institute for | University of Minnesohta Digital Simulation and Advanced Computation | dopp at acm.cs.umn.edu "Get out of my trash! I'm telling you for the last time! A man works hard for his filth, just to have vagrants steal it. It's a cryin' shame." - George Liquor in "The Boy Who Cried Rat!" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ tclug-list mailing list tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list