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How I Miss The Good Ol’ Days

That title has not told the whole story. The actual lyric is, “How I miss the good ol’ days, but I’m so glad they’re gone.” That is actually more appropriate for what we are looking at today.

For those familiar with the classic HP systems, you will recognize the item above right away. It is a terminator for an A-Class server. There are a lot of things I liked about the A-class servers. These terminators were not one of them.

The CPU connection, in general, was not one of them. For those unaware, what you see on the top of this photo is the same connection that the CPUs from this time used. What you might not see is how very delicate they are. Not only were they in danger of being damaged just from being out of the server. You could damage them just by taking them out.

In systems that had been in service for an extended time those delicate covers would kind of cook to the system board. When you pulled up the CPU for removal, you would sometimes leave a bunch of those little feet behind, disabling your CPU, or terminator.

It was a constant battle with new covers and testing this CPU then that CPU or that terminator. When you finally got a set together that worked, you locked it down and hoped it didn’t have to come out for another ten years.

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