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Another wayback find

That title is your clue that we are looking at a very old piece of gear today. If you are familiar with the Classic 3000 systems, this might look familiar. If not, you might be able to reason a guess just based on what you see. The bigger picture and some more details are below.

This is a CPU board for a K-Class server. These were released in the mid 90s and had processors that ranged from a start of 100MHz to 240MHz at the top end. The CPU boards were unique. Rather than the traditional CPU slot on a system board we think of today, these were all in one boards that slid into the chassis and plugged into the system board.

For some perspective, the board you are looking at here is roughly 14″ x 9″ and the heatsink from the top photo is about 2.5″ wide. They are huge and, by all modern standards, very slow. But you could put up to six of them in a system, depending on which model you had.

As you can imagine, the K-Class chassis was also quite large. They measure roughly 18″ wide x 26″ high, and 23″ deep. Weight depended on your configuration, but you didn’t want to pick one up by yourself. It’s fascinating to look back on these systems that seem almost archaic given our modern computing world. Especially when you realize that this really wasn’t that long ago in the big picture.

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