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Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

I seem to recall really damn long cards on some early PCs, maybe XTs, but searching Wikipedia only find 16 bit ISA and VLB (much later in 486 era). Am I hallucinating? Maybe on some server vendor stuff. Like SCSI or something? Some of them had proprietary daughterboards too.

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try "full length 8 bit ISA cards". Here's a transputer card https://www.ebay.com/itm/256438778055, memory and I/O cards were pretty common iirc

edit: and video cards of course

Yeah, you don't even need to go that exotic. E.g. an IBM CGA card:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#/media/...

Yes, some of those early cards were monsters usually due to some combination of discrete 7400-series logic (i.e. economies of scale weren't there for most ASICs yet) and memory chips (individual DIP chips as SIMM/DIMM modules weren't a thing yet) in the 8086 and into the 80268 era. I remember issues with some of the early clones not having full length/height slots causing an issue with some of those cards. By the 386 era, those monster cards had mostly died out on the desktop side at least (there were a few specialty cards that persisted into the late 80's/early 90's probably before enough customers complained about not fitting in their new system.)

remember these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard

And now hard disks plug directly into sockets on the motherboard. (Well, NVMe ones do)

Disk On Module components for industrial computers have been doing this since we have had rewriteable non-volatile solid state memory.

I had Compact Flash cards with adapters on motherboard IDE ports on systems in 2000... i think that counts to

The Performance Analyzer version of the PlayStation development board took up 3 ISA slots. Once PCI slots started to outnumber ISA slots we struggled to find motherboards for them.

I owned an S3 local bus card of this type. It was my first computer purchase after college graduation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuBus

I had something like this from a temp job that was liquidating old hardware. They were Northgate PCs and they had two extended 32-bit ISA slots that were giant memory cards. I’m pretty sure the platform was i386.

This comment for some reason made me think of some very long things that looked like card slots sorta but I believe took very long ribbon cables. Might be that ?

No idea what they were

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