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BTS: LPX teardown fail (Patreon)

Published:
2025-07-07 01:37:05
Edited:
2025-07-07 01:44:27
Imported:
2026-06

Content

I'm working on a script right now about a weird intermediate PC form factor standard called "LPX" that arose at roughly the same time as "baby AT" but was totally unknown at the time, due to being an OEM-only standard with no formal spec. I needed to do an experiment before I could finish the script, decided to record it so I wouldn't have to do it again for the video - then the experiment failed, so it'll never end up in the final video! But you might enjoy watching this anyway, idk.

It was also just an experiment to figure out what I can do in my new home office space; learned some things about how I need to light it and calibrate my cameras and whatnot. Good times.

If anyone has any solid info on this LPX thing (not unsourced assertions from 2000s-era PC reference books, i have plenty of those, I'm looking for actual, contemporary citations) I would appreciate it!

(BTS is Behind The Scenes. not the kpop group)

Files

LPX teardown fail

Comments

Matthew Cooper

RetroBytes mentions network booting DOS PCs in computer labs at University in the UK in his Token Ring video. I don't know exactly how old he is but I'm guessing that would have been around 1992-94. I was watching the most recent video on clabretro's channel about the IBM RS/6000 which has a similar riser and it got me thinking about the proprietary cards in the Eduquest. Are you absolutely certain the pinout on those cards is identical to normal ISA? Maybe they couldn't be normal cards for the trace routing to work on a 2/4 layer PCB that had connectors on both sides.

cathoderaydude

Good question - I can't recall if I tried loose-mounting a standard ISA card in those slots.

cathoderaydude

thanks patreon for having enter be send message. anyway: i'll go check out that video and see if I can glean any further info, I didn't think netboot was a thing by that point!

Matthew Cooper

It's a very brief story. Looking at it again he says it involved a boot floppy so might not be the exact thing you're talking about e.g. a boot ROM.

D. Roscoe

I love how curtly you say "that's the weed number" in this one, like you're saying it purely out of obligation.

Henry T

Was definitely really curious about the Western Digital part of this

Tnarg42

Regarding network booting PCs, you may want to look into Netware and Ethernet boot ROMs. It was totally a thing in 1994. I worked in a printing plant from 1996-1998 that was full of diskless 286 and 386 PCs, wired with 10Base-2, that booted off a Netware server. Netware hosted boot floppy images that loaded DOS and started our production software on the PCs on the plant floor. So much paper dust in those PCs....

cathoderaydude

Thank you for setting me straight! I knew it was a thing outside of the PC but had the impression PCs weren't doing it yet. I'll definitely look into this

Grey Panther

FWIW, audio was fine all along.

cathoderaydude

Oh terrific, I forgot I was even experimenting with that haha. I picked up this AT2020 mic yesterday for $25 and wasn't prepared for it to be so decent!

Philip Storry

Yep, this was definitely a thing. In 1992 my school put in a brand new computer network, and all the 486SX clients would boot to a Novell login prompt and then load Windows 3.1 after login. The Novell ethernet boot was what was providing the files - there was no internal hard disk in the client machines. The big advantage was that Windows was then protected by the Netware file permissions, which meant that the pupils couldn't go fiddling around with too much in Windows. The disadvantage was no swapping or similar features could be enabled, but that was less of an issue in an educational environment. Sadly although I was already very familiar with DOS and quickly became au fait with Netware file and account management, the network boot part was well beyond my abilities - all I can really do is confirm that it was definitely a thing in September 1992, and that it must have been a fairly standard and mature thing by then for a school to be using it.

Philip Storry

Yeah - it seems a little odd, but maybe they had issues with manufacturers building boards that made it harder to fit more hard disks?

Philip Storry

Around the 13 minute mark you mention Windows NT domains and say that may have come in with NT 4. They were always a part of Windows NT, coming in with the first version (3.1). The Windows NT Domain system is basically a progression of Microsoft's older LAN Manager networking system, and had some backwards compatibility with it. LAN Manager ran on OS2 1.3, so Microsoft had an incentive to replace it with something fully under their control once the split between them and IBM over OS/2 became a thing.

Philip Storry

Great video - thanks! I think you may be being a bit harsh on the standard at the end - all standards have to start somewhere, and this definitely feels like the first steps in the direction of ATX. Hopefully you can find a way to use this experience in the main video when it comes out. 😊

Tnarg42

I am guessing that Dell not only had an Ethernet adapter, but it had one with the necessary boot ROM. I have no evidence of this, but I'm guessing Novell had a pretty steep mark-up on those briefly on their NE1000/NE2000 cards (due to value, not cost). The first generation of NE2000 clone cards all seemed to include the boot ROM, and fell all over themselves bragging that the little 16-bit ROM chip (with the necessary code, of course) was included. You're probably just seeing an echo of that in the "NetPlex" branding.

t3hbeowulf

Fun little nugget to add: AST made LPX boards for their line of AST pizzabox desktops and they used the same riser as that Dell... with a fun twist: It has an ESS 1868F sound card built onboard in addition to the 3x 16bit ISA slots and is a drop-in replacement for that Dell PC as well as any system with an ISA slot that could benefit from _more ISA slots_. https://www.ebay.com/itm/324091427033 (that seller has a breakout slot bracket for the audio+gameports as well.) Thank you for calling out LPX as a standard though. I, like you, saw these all the time in various shops and assumed they were just some proprietary design. I didn't realize that there was an attempt to standardize around them and that there were probably a finite number of combinations.

adorfer

now my Olivetti 286 machines finally make sense. those all used LPX cases!

ChiraFox

I think these kind of teardown extra videos are great for patreon btw. Pretty sure we're all here for it, even if they don't end up in a full video it's fun to watch and learn a thing or two.

EyeMWing

Here's some research leads from the recesses of my brain. Western Digital actually made more than hard drives back in the day. As best as I've ever been able to figure, the first "LPX" board was the Western Digital WD386SX-LPX (amazing naming scheme) - which was a design they sold to a bunch of OEMs, including apparently Packard Bell and Compaq for a bunch of their early 386SX models. My assumption is that that they then ended up cross-contaminating "LPX" into the rest of the industry by wanting to reuse chassis tooling, which meant ordering more parts with the same factor, which meant there were manufacturers with those parts available, which meant other OEMs could adopt them without doing any engineering. So there genuinely might not be any documentation to find, because it was all just adhoc adoption in the cutthroat PC clone biz.

adorfer

Indeed, NE1000 cards came with a socket for a boot ROM and that was around 1989.

EyeMWing

Also worth noting that the risers were, functionally, part of the mainboard. I've seen them with chips, IDE ports, and the CMOS battery up there! LPX persisted all the way up into early AGP, so you had some real wild riser setups with slots coming off both sides at weird spacings (I think Compaq had a 7-slot, with 4 slots off the normal side and 3 off the back), AGP, PCI and ISA all living together. It also blended into ATX, with some later boards adopting the ATX power supply and ACPI.

Gecko089

The additional grounding of the riser and the big ground plane might actualle be a try to shield the bus from the PSU it now faces like a nice anntenna....

KazTastic222

At least they learned their lesson after a while. Intel developed NLX, which was actually a standard, but it was too little, too late. MicroATX and enshittification (Dell's switch to proprietary parts) meant it only lasted a few years. TIL those cursed old low-profile video cards were designed for NLX

Crash Cash

Yeah, "what IBM was doing" was still a "thing" at the time. What made them irrelevant was MCA (Micro Channel Architecture) which was their attempt to regain control of the PC expansion bus. Unfortunately, it was a) an obvious power grab and b) they made it so expensive to license that everyone said "f--- that" After MCA, it was "who cares what IBM is doing, Intel and MSFT are our masters now" IIRC, the PS/2 Model 30 was the cheap POS that DIDN'T have MCA out of all the PS/2 models. I know UCF (Univ Cent Fla) bought a shit-ton of them and it's where I first saw 3.5" hard-shell floppies. FYI, there was originally a problem with the metal shutters on the floppies. They would not be bent enough, and they would spread open and jam. It was only 6mos or so, but it did kill a lot of drives in the UCF computer labs.

Crash Cash

Look at those prices for network cards: $134/$124 for ethernet... $465 for token ring!! (and 3COM always undercut everyone by $10-$15)

Crash Cash

Dell had proprietary drive rails for decades. People hated that. The only reason Dell survived was their huge educational/business deals where people could afford to standardize on that shit. When that stopped being a thing and margins got thinner, they finally went to standard rails, but it took them an ice age.

Christopher Davies

When I made my first non-token ring LAN, a four port hub set me back almost £200. A hub, no even a switch, and it was only 10Mbps.

Crash Cash

Heck, I remember it was really difficult to even GET a switch back in the day, as opposed to just a hub.

Dante Blando

Thank you for sharing the experiment. A failed hypothesis is still a tested one, and a value to observe. Someone may have already pointed this out, but Dell were famous for being slightly out of alignment with other vendor trends. They wanted people to come to them. They weren't as bad as Sony about it. They just wanted more orders in the Dell shipping center than AST or any other rival.