Cursed Images

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This is a real product from around the era of Pentium II processors. It might be the way modern computers work now, but it baffles me that CPUs were installed by expansion card like slots for like one generation. This piece of hardware converts the slot to a standard socket.

Honestly, not sure if this is cursed or just weird. I guess showing this to someone who has little to no knowledge about old computers would be confused as fuck though lol.

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That's a "slotket", allowing a socket CPU to be used in a slot. Both the Pentium 2 and Athlon were initially released in cartridges for Slot-1 and Slot-A. The reason for the cartridge format was cost and performance, putting all the L2 cache on die(as part of the chip) would be very expensive, placing the cache on the motherboard like in the past would be very slow.
Or even worse, shady resellers and manufacturers would resume putting out motherboards with fake cache.
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(cursed cache, those are just bits of plastic)

It was a temporary compromise, I don't think the cartridges were around for more than 2 years.

There were legit reasons to take a later CPU that didn't come in cartridge form and put it into a dirt cheap "slotket" like that and it was because the 440BX motherboard chipset was a bit too good and worth hanging on to. Intel had accidentally created a $100 motherboard with the features and functionality of their $1,500 enterprise offerings, at the same time they accidentally released a compatible $120 CPU that was faster than their flagship $650 CPU.

Intel fixed the problem of their consumer products being too good by making future ones worse and for no reason at all the now competitive AMD saw their stock rise from $8 a share to $48 in less than a year.
 
This made me recoil with disgust/terror. Nice job.

Thank fuck it was obviously not the same mouth as the nailclipper one, but that exposed nerve biting into ice-cream.....bruh. My upper mandible is singing in sympathy.

It could have been worse....
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Also

AnOminous said:
I remember some old 8086 systems would accept a 286 upgrade in an ISA slot. So this kind of thing isn't unique. I think there were also tiny math coprocessor cards for boards that didn't have a chip slot for them. They were usually those miserable centipede-like chips you had to jam into the board and if you weren't careful the ridiculously fragile legs would break. There was a tool to do this but you had always lost it whenever you needed it.
Yep, there were even expansion boards for PCs that used different architecture like the Amiga's Zorro slots that had a 80286 CPU and a few other chips that could give those computers full PC compatability instead of going through an emulation layer (and believe me, emulating 32-bit CISC Intel instructions on a 7Mhz 16-bit Motorola CPU is beyond slow to the point of uselessness.) It seemed they cost almost as much as buying a full 286 clone at the time, but they were pretty popular with accounting departments that demanded DOS compatibility when the business was already standardized on Apple, Atari or Commodore PCs. That was a cool time to be a geek.
 
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