January 1997 brings a look ahead at exciting new technologies including the massively overhyped MMX extensions from Intel, the slow to catch on USB, … Firewire and DVD, which had already appeared on covers from 1996.
http://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/157446016891/tech-backissues-january-1997-brings-a-look-ahead
In the January 1997 issue of boot, the big stories were USB, Firewire, MMX (still and again), LucasArts Jedi Knight (I can’t believe this came out that long ago), DVD, 56kbps modems and 3D accelerators.
USB was off to a slow start in terms of available peripherals. I remember buying a scanner in 1998 and my choices were SCSI and parallel port. I think the adoption of USB was helped greatly by the introduction of the iMac the following year as it didn’t have a floppy drive but did have USB ports.
FireWire (or IEEE 1394) is often described as a niche product but it was a pretty big niche. If you had a DV, miniDV or Digital8 camcorder in the late 1990s to early 2000s and beyond, you were probably using firewire if you were transferring anything to the computer. It was also fairly successful as a connectivity option for external drives and only since USB 3.0 has that really faded away. Outside of those markets it wasn’t all that successful though firewire networks and other peripherals did exist.
MMX was ultimately an important technology but given its capabilities originally it was definitely overhyped, especially with the popularization of 3D accelerators around the same time.
When typical hard drive sizes were in the hundreds of megabytes DVD was a pretty big deal as a data storage option at 4.7ish GB per disc. Unfortunately, this early on they were only DVD-ROM drives so you couldn’t actually save YOUR data on one, you could only buy commercial discs with movies or software already on them.
It’s hard to believe but modems capable of 56kbps were state of the art in 1998. This was the fastest choice for most people for internet or other remote computer to computer access and it was brand new in 1998. Broadband was very limited at this time though as I recall I had a cable modem the following year as soon as that technology was available in my area.
https://steemit.com/retrocomputing/@darth-azrael/boot-january-1997