this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
1483 points (98.7% liked)
Comic Strips
20718 readers
4183 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- AI-generated comics aren't allowed.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I remember back in the day we had ISA cards without a backplate. These were 8-bit cards, so just a single connector without any keying. You could easily put these in backwards and doing so would short the motherboard. Often this killed the motherboard, even though it was relatively easy to repair (most of the times). Most motherboards had small resistors or capacitors that did double duty as a fuse, so when the short happened those would blow and would be replaceable. However that meant taking out the motherboard and replacing components with a soldering iron. Luckily there were repair shops that could do this for you, or replace the motherboard if more damage occurred.
Computers weren't always easy to work with, a lot of time and effort went into making it as simple as it is today. Or was I should say, as computers have been killed off by Nvidia.
This keels the motherboard.
...but why? That's not even mechanically stable! What're ya gonna do, re-seat the card every time you move the computer?!
I mean, I get that it was a different time, but that feels janky even by '80s or '90s standards. Were these DIY cards or something?
Usually back then cases had retention slots to hold on to the cards. This was a hold over from back in the days when computers were just card cages. So if the card didn't need any connectors, it simply wouldn't have any backplate. Another reason for no backplate was smaller computers, more in the style of earlier home computers. They often had stuff like a disk controller put somewhere flat, to keep the size of the case down.
The early XT and AT times were wild with all sorts of weird and fun form factors. We've become so accustomed to standards these days. But that primarily due to IBM becoming really dominant so people would make software, hardware and accessories compatible with IBM to target the biggest market. That in turn lead to other companies copying IBM into so called clones which were mostly compatible (and a real pain in the butt when the compatibility wasn't quite there). For a long time the standards were just do whatever IBM does.
This in turn hurt IBM, because it limited what sort of things they could change. If they broke compatibility, the new product wouldn't sell as well. We've seen the same thing later with Intel attempting to get away from x86 and the market refusing. For years ISA would still be on the motherboard, even though slots for it and things like IDE had gone away. I think some super IO controllers these days still have some parts of ISA in them, although I might be wrong on that.