> The iMac was a huge success for Apple, revitalizing the company and influencing competitors' product designs. It played a role in abandoning legacy technologies like the floppy disk, serial ports, and Apple Desktop Bus in favor of Universal Serial Bus. The product line was updated throughout 1998 until 2001 with new technology and colors, eventually being replaced by the iMac G4 and eMac.
> ...
> A later hardware update created a sleeker design. This second-generation iMac featured a slot-loading optical drive, FireWire, "fanless" operation (through free convection cooling), a slightly updated shape, and the option of AirPort wireless networking. Apple continued to sell this line of iMacs until March 2003, mainly to customers who wanted the ability to run the older Mac OS 9 operating system. USB and FireWire support, and support for dial-up, Ethernet, and wireless networking (via 802.11b and Bluetooth) soon became standard across Apple's entire product line. The addition of high-speed FireWire corrected the deficiencies of the earlier iMacs.
FireWire is serial, too. It seems that, over larger distances, parallel only is faster up to a certain clock frequency (or if you want to go to extreme
lengths to ensure each wire in a parallel channel has the same transmission delay, as Cray did (https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/comments/11vku2/each_of_t...)
Right. There was a period in maybe the 2000s? when a number of the formerly parallel interconnect technologies were being replaced by serial ones because the frequencies had gotten high enough that clock skew was becoming a big problem.
