So, I had a bunch of ideas for installments of Education Yourself that I never got around to. I might still do them some day, somewhere else. But for now, here's what I had in mind:

TRS-80 MC-10 and Matra Alice

This was the next planned article I had eluded to. Tandy made a flop and sold it off to the French, becoming the Matra Alice with some unique details that actually gave it a somewhat beloved user base! Problem is, I was trying to make sure my information was up-to-date, and I hit a strong language barrier, so I never got to actually writing it.

The Osborne Crisis

A more in-depth look at Osborne's luggable computers, the genesis of the Osborne Effect, and the actual human impact of it. In short, it's similar to what happened to Cohost (they ran out of money to give employees a living wage)

SuperFX After The SNES

Ideally, this would have been a collaboration of sorts with Retro Game Mechanics Explained, with part 1 being the history of the SuperFX and how it works as part of RGME's video series on the inner workings of the SNES. This chost would have been a part 2 to it, showing how it evolved into a 32-bit and then 64-bit RISC architecture that has native, official Linux support! Except they're killing it off in favor of RISC-V, because of course

The Episode I Rag On My Favorite Architecture

I love the 68K, I really do, but MAN they made some pretty big fuckups during its lifetime. Would have included embedded mini-chosts in a similar manner to my Monument of Modern Tech Fuckups series of chosts, because oh my God they had Spectre in the 80s

How To Destroy Linux

Mostly a historical overview of the GNU Project and GNU's Hurd operating system. The punchline would be to finish Hurd, as that would cause a violent tectonic shift in the FOSS ecosystem, since Stallman actually hates Linux.

The Life and Stupid Death of Darwin

Did you all remember the time Apple made an entirely FOSS OS? Well, they did! And boy the way it died was incredibly stupid. In short: fears of Hackintoshes and a community of n00bs. Also, an aside on the licensing titled "Two Copylefts Don't Make A Copyright".

Motorola has done some fairly interesting things in the world of computing history, despite being overshadowed by Zilog and MOS in the 8-bit era. Their 68000 CPU line is obviously one of my all-time favorites, powering many iconic computers from the mid-80s onwards. However in this episode, we will be looking at a somewhat obscure yet highly impactful thing they made that shaped quite a bit of historical systems. And that is the, uhm... the data sheet for the Motorola MC6883 Synchronous Address Multiplexer.

I swear this is more interesting than it sounds.

I've been putting this one off because it is just... painful to talk about. I hate this computer. I really, really do. It is an unredeemable piece of shit. There is no reason for it to exist. It does nothing correctly... and then new information came to light. And this information contains the one actual thing it did right. This was planned to be the launch of the series here on Cohost, but Microcode and the Itanium were far more enjoyable to write about.

But it's time. I've put this off long enough. It's time to talk about...
...you.

In technology there is a relentless drive for Faster, Better, Cheaper. Of the three we often get to pick only two. Then Intel revealed the Itanium and told the world to pick NONE. This is due to a deep, fundamental design flaw in the entire architecture as a whole, but most people don't completely understand what it is, why it is important, and how Intel managed to get it so, so wrong.

Today on Education Yourself, we will be looking at the mechanism that makes processors as fast as they are, and how Itanium messed it up so badly that it is now the laughing stock of CPU design.