My work used to use (until a project I worked on* to bypass it) a document formatter that lived in a set of chips on an ISA card

ISA slots went rare with Pentium 1/586; were extinct not much later

We had a beige box and a backup beige box. When parts failed the replacements were incredibly expensive (enough it was worth 12*60 pdays of fixing)

(* On resumes, I was totally critical to that project; in reality it was build led, and I was in design)