Today’s Tedium highlights ACCESS.bus, the would-be standard that wanted to be USB, but couldn’t stick the landing.

Also called the Inter-Integrated Circuit protocol, it’s used as a low-level way to communicate with peripherals, both in its original form and through its de facto successor, SMBus. Developed in the early 1980s by Philips Semiconductor, I²C may be one of the oldest things still in wide use in most modern computers beyond the x86 instruction set—and it is often key to adding driver support into operating systems.

We have long left ACCESS.bus, our would-be contender for the USB throne, into the dustbin of history, but DDC is still at the root of how both HDMI and DisplayPort communicate with our computers.