Thunderbolt to Firewire or Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2?

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analogika
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Re: Thunderbolt to Firewire or Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2?

Post by analogika » Wed May 05, 2021 8:20 am

Drone wrote:
Wed Apr 28, 2021 6:58 am
analogika wrote:
Tue Apr 27, 2021 11:55 pm
Drone wrote:
Tue Apr 27, 2021 11:16 am
Pardon my slowness, but your first sentence is that Thunderbolt is both USB and Firewire, to me that says, you just need the right cable.
Thunderbolt ports carry both USB and FireWire, and I believe DisplayPort and hdmi as well. I’m not deep into the technical details, but AFAIK, usb works by plugging in the right cable; anything else needs some sort of active conversion.
But how can we say it carries it, if it requires conversion? I mean it's like saying an unbalanced out, is also a balanced out, if you use a converter. It's true that you can get a pseudo balanced signal, but I wouldn't consider it a balanced output.
Yeah, you're *kind of* right.

Thunderbolt is, IIUC, basically an external PCI Express socket that also does USB and some other things, and as such, you can hook up virtually anything that you can hook up to a PCI Express lane. You could also just hook up an external Thunderbolt chassis and stick a PCI Express Firewire card in there. That would probably work, as well.
Y'all have already confirmed that the only way to connect new laptop to old interface, is a double dongling it, but it all sounds so ludicrous, just nobody has bothered to make a Thunderbolt 3 to Firewire interface. Yet everybody still claims, oh yeah, Thunderbolt 3 is Firewire!!
Nobody has built a TB3 to Firewire adapter because the only computer manufacturer who ever really embraced Firewire and stuck with it after the consumer DV cam market switched to USB-based solutions (AVCHD?) was Apple, and they started gradually dropping Firewire from newly released machines in 2008, introducing Thunderbolt on new machines in March 2011.

By the time the first Thunderbolt 3 machines were released in late 2016, Firewire had been irrelevant to all but a tiny sliver of existing users on legacy hardware for more than half a decade.

IOW, the six people who care about ancient digital interfaces and don't also happen to have ancient computers sitting around to deal with them can buy them dongles. Nobody else cares. :|

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