Hey Archie,

Sorry for the Geekie terms... Firewire or I-Link are both copyrighted names that are used by Sony and Apple. Both of these really are an implementation of a high-speed serial interface, which the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) has called it IEEE-1394. This High-Speed Serial interface is great for transferring video data from one device to another (such as a camera to a computer). The advantages of a high-speed interface is that the consumer doesn't have to (or want's to) wait for the data to go from the digital video camera to the computer.

To give you an idea of the amounts of data we are talking about here, remember the CD I did of the HGtv's interview of Dale Seymour? The raw video after being captured on my hard drive for that ~10 minutes of video took up ~1 Gig of space on my hard drive. You also see that the "movie" was not full screen. If it were, the file size would have been much, much larger!!!

This raw video data was captured in real time - which took ~10 minutes to transfer the 1 Gigabyte worth of data.
If the video was captured on a digital video camera, that is 8 gigabits of data (8 bits = 1 byte thus 1 Gigabytes = 8 Gigabits), then the time required to transfer this 10 minutes of digital video data would be 20 seconds using the IEEE-1394 interface... This also assumes that the hard drive can take data transfers at rates higher than anything that this computer system has in it.
Note using a USB (at 1.5 Mbits per second), it would take 5333.33 seconds (or 1 hr, 28 min, 53.33 seconds) to transfer this same digital video file...

Yes we all love speed! It is addictive. Some of us can remember the ol' 8088 based PC's, or the 80286 AT's. Does anyone think that they would punt their current computer(s) and go back to an AT or even to a PC?!? (Even if they could run the current operating systems and applications...) I don't think so...
As an example my current machine is a Pentium Pro 200MHz machine. It has been great! At work I use a 200 MHz PII, a 550 MHz PIII, and Sun Work Stations.
The 550 MHz PIII is used in the digital imaging area, and man does PhotoShop fly on that machine!!! Now when I go home and use my Pentium Pro 200 MHz machine, I think it is slow... So much so, I've ordered a new computer, and yes it is an 800 MHz PIII with 256 Mbytes of RAM. I can't wait to get it up and running!!!

Oops... Sorry for the "side bar"... Oops Again! - sorry for the Lawyer joke...

Dick