I'm going to get really petty here.
Why do all our expansion cards have to be upside down? […]
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I'm going to get really petty here.
Why do all our expansion cards have to be upside down?
With ISA they were upside right - back when most cases were horizontal and it didn't matter.
When PCI was introduced, they flipped the cards over so they could have 1 "shared" slot position, where 2 slots line up with the same case opening. Okay, fine.
By this time, tower cases were taking over.
A few years later AGP is introduced for graphics cards, but they kept them upside down.
This heralded the era of high powered cards that needed to dissipate a lot of heat. Would have worked better if they were facing up. Doing so would also point large coolers into an open area that would be pretty easy to officially reserve for their usage.
Several years after that, "PCI Express" is introduced, and they *still* didn't take the opportunity to reorient the cards.
So it's been what.. 27 years now? and the cards still haven't flipped back over. I guess it will never happen.
If my case is open, or I have a window.. I want to actually see the cards, not their back ends.
Like I said, petty. But it's been bothering me since my first PCI card that I thought was defective until I figured out it was actually supposed to go in that way.