eBay: found a pentium4 motherboard with 4xISA slots!!!

How many ISA slots do you count in that picture there? This is essentially an industrial motherboard.

oh yeah, they are 3... 🤣 so ???
this is NOT an industrial mobo. industrial mobos are not like that, they would have extended ISA slots for SBC, and surely extended PCI slots...
It is just a mobo that was designed for people that still need to use ISA cards, hence the high price, limited production/bying interest...

There is also mainboards with vacuum tubes on them...

I'd seen this before, since someone mentioned it in passing in relation to 2x AGP cards. Interesting that that one doesn't appear to have an AGP slot, though, when the spec indicates that it maybe should...

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

There is also mainboards with vacuum tubes on them...

Wow. Why?

It's for the sound freaks who like to have a tube in the audio signal path 😀

http://www.active-hardware.com/english/review … -533-tube-3.htm

iBASE still make mobos with ISA slots.
http://www.ibase-i.com.tw/motherboardglance.htm

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

It's for the sound freaks who like to have a tube in the audio signal path 😀

Oh, is that all? I'd have thought it would be better to integrate something like that into an external device.

A vacuum tube and a crappy AC97 codec? I don't get the point...

I don't produce those things 😉

I brought it up to show that strange things can exist without being industrial.

Zup wrote:

A vacuum tube and a crappy AC97 codec? I don't get the point...

Those are the words I was looking for.