Thunderbolt Delivers on a Promise Made with the First Macintosh

Low End Mac’s Dan Knight says that when Apple introduced the Early 2011 MacBook Pro models with Thunderbolt, something clicked in the back of his mind. Knight, something of an Apple historian, observes that with Thunderbolt, Apple has delivered on a promise made when the original Macintosh was introduced in 1984 – and then some.

Dan provides a retrospective of Apple’s I/O interface development, beginning with the original Mac’s high-speed Serial port, through USB 1.1 and 2.0, SCSI, FireWire 400 and 800, and now Thunderbolt, which he says may finally deliver on the high speed serial bus promise from the original Macintosh – but thousands of times faster, and designed as a full-fledged expansion bus, not simply a data interface, able to support monitors, hard drives, networking, USB 3 and FireWire adapters, and Target Disk Mode. It will even be possible to add an external video card thanks to Thunderbolt’s extreme bandwidth and intelligent design and enough juice to bus-power an external 3.5” drive, and incorporating PCI Express, which means that anything that can be put on a PCIe expansion card could also be built into a Thunderbolt device – all through the Mini DisplayPort connector that Apple adopted a while back, so the new MacBook Pros gained Thunderbolt without adding another port.

Dan predicts that Thunderbolt will eventually replace FireWire, Ethernet, USB 3, and USB 2 except for I/O device connections and backwards compatibility with legacy USB devices – the port of the future, and only Macs have it at present.

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