I absolutely loved expresscard. So many crazy projects from the last decade wouldn't have been possible without it. I had an "eGPU" on a laptop back in 2012 by

I absolutely loved expresscard. So many crazy projects from the last decade wouldn't have been possible without it. I had an "eGPU" on a laptop back in 2012 by hooking up a riser card to an expresscard slot [1]. The image quality was atrocious and the stuttering almost gave me a stroke, but it was still neat to use a desktop video card with a laptop. The best part about EC was that there was no "handshakes" or any other software layer nonsense like you get with Thunderbolt, it was just plain old PCIe and it just worked. Every device you plugged in was fully "native" to the system and didn't require any screwy stuff to work right. SAS controllers just worked. 4x network cards just worked. Serial cards just worked. These days, my old Dell workstation is on its last legs, it's looking like EC is a dead end. It's a shame, because I doubt we'll ever see that level of simplicity for connecting random devices to our computers again. Yes, the connector sucked and the form factor was awkward, but it really had a special place to me. [1] https://images-fe.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51cyhJ95LsL._SY300_QL70_.jpg https://images-fe.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51cyhJ95LsL...