The Mysterious System Part II

And so, after bringing in the system back to the office, Boss and I gave it the once-over. It a very mysterious system indeed. Initially, I struck it off as just a system where the seller tried to pull a fast one and polished the casing and also removed the serial numbers, etc. But after looking at it thoroughly, I was really stumped.

OK, so I put the two cabinets side by side. Normally, they
look the same, which is rightly so as both base and the
expansion cabinets were designed to be stackable. But if
you look closely, there is a small difference.

In a normal Base cabinet, the connectors for the CPU
cards are designed to be placed slightly higher up
than the ones for the interface cards. Here, with the
normal Base cabinet, this is what it would look like.

But on the mysterious expansion cabinet, the design
was the same too. In fact, for a normal expansion
cabinet, the first two connectors would line up with
the rest. So, this is really different. I would have
thought the seller put in a Base motherboard into an
expansion cabinet. But who would want to do this?

Another point is that on the Base cabinet, you would
have connectors for the other expansion cabinets to
connect to. Only a Base cabinet would have these
connectors to communicate with the other cabinets.

And on a normal expansion cabinet, they would only
have these connectors. But how on earth can a Base
motherboard have expansion connectors?

Boss mentioned he did hear of such system, most
probably a demo unit, which, I assumed could be
a prototype or just a real demo unit to show some

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customers how a Base or Expansion unit works.
With this, you can have either way. And we looked
at each other, like boys who have found a secret....