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How about these little LED boards with pins all over the backside, and these keypads?

Led boards: gold pins peripheral not gold pins midgrade

P=peripheral
M=midgrade

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Ok, so the left board in this 5-9-2 photo is a hard drive board with the pins removed. I just found two more like it in one of my piles. Would it go peripheral?

Three more photos of boards I came across today.

That would drop the board to low telco
The other two covered earlier elsewhere

On to the new stuff
2 peripheral one gold finger card

All peripheral

Both peripheral

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What makes the distinction between Peripheral and Low Telco?

Practice.
Seriously! Look at the photo of what Chris has posted as low telco and tell me with a straight face you wouldn’t consider that midgrade or peripheral.
Low telco covers the peripheral level board range for items in those classes that have exceptional value; more than standard for the class.
It could be a larger IC population, and high quality ICs. It could be a know and massive quantity of nickel, gold, or silver. (Like the gallery photo). Gold quantity. Value per square mm of board. Etc.

The high telco class serves the same function in higher grade levels.

What makes either telco grade is defined by Chris. Learning to sort them is ultimately a matter of practice.

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I’m not arguing; I just want to learn. Lost said the HDD boards without pins would go to low telco when I thought they might be peripheral.

How about these scanner sensors?

Is there a place where you tell how to grade old moboards with soldered CPUs? (8086, 286, 386 and 486)

Those optics boards are peripheral. They almost always are.

Such motherboards need photos. They depend on two things.
A) the design of the board and its layout
B) age: of the board, the CPU, and other ICs.

386 and 486 chips are still made regularly today. As are boards that use them.
But an oqfp version of a 486 from 2019 isn’t remotely in the same value class as the original CPGA version.

Old pre completed kit boards such as Tandy and symphony will generally be high or low telco. Mostly because they contain all the separable components soldered to the board. Video, memory, disk controllers, etc. Others, like the BBC computers and most Video Game motherboards, are often peripheral.

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Nah, these are all like early Dell and AST. I’ll post photos when I get inside tonight.