cathoderaydude
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Let's Try This Again: LPX!
🕑 Added 2025-07-17 17:43:25 +0000 UTCOkay! Alright! Here we go! This is a significantly overhauled version of the LPX video; I made a bunch of adjustments, added some jokes+gags, and shot about ten minutes of new footage that change the entire thrust of the narrative.
I say this a lot, but it bears repeating: I could not do this without all of you. Several people in the comments here and in private messages pointed out the severe errors I'd made the first time around, and I know I wouldn't have fixed them otherwise.
Like any public figure (or god forbid, "microcelebrity") I periodically have to endure the embarrassment of being treated like I can do no wrong when knowing full well that I screw up constantly. An awful lot of my scripts have extremely deep flaws, which I often only realize moments before I was going to shoot them; other times, I don't catch them, I shoot the video, and I end up having to scrap the whole thing and redo it. And then, occasionally, I come this close to releasing a "finished" video that's just garbage.
The original narrative of the LPX video was crap; it might not have been recognizable as such if you aren't versed in the subject matter, but that's the thing, I am, and I should have known better. Had I put out the last version of this video, I would have been utterly roasted for asserting that the PS/2 wasn't broadly relevant to PC history. I could defend that by saying my point was that people don't tend to acknowledge it as such, which is true, but I can't really cover up the fact that I brain-farted a whole swath of information that I've known and internalized for decades. For someone acting as an authority (and no matter how I want to present myself, that's the role I've been given) that's just unacceptable, and I'd deserve the criticism I'd get.
I wish my brain worked better - a sentiment I'm sure many of us have held before :p - and sometimes I wonder if it was smart to take on a career like this knowing The Way I Am, but the saving grace, at least, is that I have an audience that's willing to gently coax me onto the right path. Thank you all so much.
Comments
Cathode Ray Dude
yep, life's just complicated.
seagull
been a while, gravis. you alright?
Akshay Anand
I'm here waiting for Eduquest Part 3. Your focus on 80s/90s computing over the past few months brings me renewed hope that you will revisit the Eduquest after almost 3 years lol
Elsie Hupp
I wonder how much more information you’d be able to find if you were able to read and write Traditional Chinese. Maybe all the people gossiping about LPX online back in the day were just doing so in a language you can’t read! Yes, I recognize that “LPX” is a Latin acronym, but foreign words get transliterated into Chinese homophones all the time. For instance, when I visited Shanghai in 2011 I went to a clothing store called “Urban Renewal”, but on my credit card statement it was spelled something like “Erben Linuwo”, which I assume is a re-transliteration of the Chinese characters back into Pinyin. When it comes to Chinese companies marketing in the West, personally I would prefer Pinyin transliterations or direct literal translations to the alphabet soup we get on Amazon. There is a norm in the West that we don’t translate proper nouns, though sometimes we replace them with cognates (e.g. Charles/Carlos/Karl/Carol) or modify the spelling to make them easier to pronounce, but a lot of proper names for things in Chinese have much more legible direct translations just based on the characters used to write them. For illustration, here’s Xiran Jay Zhao: https://youtube.com/shorts/kWdAsbWr9aE Grape Teeth! https://youtube.com/shorts/e79M2UCFoyI (It’s interesting how these are a mix of literal meanings and convenient homophones.) https://youtube.com/shorts/sWaPOujevOs More of an explanation of the process at work here: https://youtube.com/shorts/9mRAOGBRUlg
J Brandt Buckley
After watching the side channel video, I tried to find the spec myself to no luck. Some of the historical PDFs I collected while searching were kind of interesting though: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1qDux4tVFvbucDLlOGitJEJmj2p0IRL8N I ended up going down a rabbit hole of my own making to answer the question: What was the historical context of Western Digital's involvement? (See the "_Highlighted" dir for sources.) Summary: In the mid-to-late-80s Western Digital went on a M&A buying spree in pursuit of a vision they called "interarchitecture". According to WD, having control over more pieces would allow them to build tighter integrations for better performance and cost. (I imagine the prospect of being able to lock down that part of the ecosystem was also not lost on them.) On 1987-04-30, they announced they would be acquiring Faraday Electronics, a company whose jam was creating motherboards with a bunch of functionality consolidated into a handful of chips. That reduces the bill of materials, cost, manufacturing complexity, and power consumption of the final product -- by 60-80% if you believe their marketing. The LPX motherboard seems to have come out of that acquisition. Also in April 1987, IBM announced the PS/2. IBM made it clear they'd be exerting more control over it so as not to be undercut by the clones again. That triggered an industry-wide backlash that resulted in the development of a bunch of standards outside of IBM. It's possible this is an example of one such company paving their own road. That said, in 1990, WD had a some cross-licensing agreements with IBM and was negotiating a role in the manufacturing of IBM's first laptops. So they might have had a cozier relationship with Big Blue than the "gang of six" companies. WD didn't do much to execute their integration vision in the first few years post-acquisition, but they announced a renewed focus on it in 1989. To that end, they built a big new HQ and a $119-million fab in Irvine, CA. Ultimately, the level of integration they envisioned never came to pass -- at least not under WD's auspices. Around 1994, they began selling off some of their acquisitions. They seem to have either fully integrated or dissolved most of Faraday, though.
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