Time Machine to Backup two different mac computers on a single firewire 500

I have a new generation MacBook and iMacG5 and a single Maxtor 500 GB external hard drive which has two firewire inputs. I connexted both macs by firewire to this external hard drive. I used Time Machine on both computers which are on at the same time. However I can see Time Machine works well on one mac - where I can see each hourly backup but the other mac backups don't show up. I called Tech support and was told that I cannot have both macs on at the same time accessing the same external hard drive. I see two different files for each computer's backup so why can't both computers be running Time Machine at the same time?
So...I thought I should buy the new Time Capsule 1 TB BUT I worry the same access issues will occur. How does the Time Capsule drive wirelessly operate with two macs simultaneously when I was told that Time Machine would not operate via firewire with multiple computers on a single drive.
Any suggestions...are the Tech Support folks incorrect about using Time Machine with firewire access simultaneously with two different macs?

What you cannot do is connect two computers to a single FW drive enclosure at the same time. You can connect the drive to each computer separately. Time Capsule functions as a network drive thus any machine on the network can access the shared network drive. This is not the same as using an external FW drive.
If you want to use your single FW drive to backup two computers, I suggest you first partition the drive into two equal partitions. Use one partition for the TM backup of one computer, and the other partition as the TM backup for the second computer. However, you will need to physically move the drive from one computer to the other in order to perform backups.
Alternatively, if you have a local network set up you can physically connect the drive to one computer, then set up file sharing so that the other computer can mount the shared drive and use it for backup via the Ethernet network (or wireless if it's a wireless setup.) Unfortunately, I'm not positive this will work because TM is known to have some problems backing up to network devices although it is supposed to be able to backup to network drives.
Nevertheless, you should set up two partitions on the drive for each computer in order to keep the backups separate.

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