4 ms·
PCMCIA has always been my favorite form factor. One of my favorite deployments of it was to make a router out of a laptop - and use two of the xircom realport
by rsync 4y ago
PCMCIA has always been my favorite form factor.
One of my favorite deployments of it was to make a router out of a laptop - and use two of the xircom realport "mating" cards to give the laptop two real rj45 ports without any dongles:
https://www.premisesnetworks.com/doc/pc-card-0008 https://www.premisesnetworks.com/doc/pc-card-0008
... combine that with an already existing rj45 on the laptop and you had a three-port gateway with a built-in KVM and a built-in UPS.
- jmrm 4y agoReading this is pretty funny to me because my first wireless router was a common one with a PCMCIA slot to connect a WiFi card :-)
- dylan604 4y agoMacBookPro G3 with PCMIA slot, an Orinoco Gold card, a Pringles can made into a Yagi style antenna, and a friend with a car for wardriving sessions. memory lane...
- jimmySixDOF 4y agowe used to play around with them pre 802.11 as WaveLAN for under the radar point-to-point links back when the max 2Mbps was eye popping fast and eye popping expensive lol
- samstave 4y agothis is the best sentence I have read on HN in a long time
- rootsudo 4y agoI was thinking what was the gold card and kept thinking of cryix cpu's, but it was Orinoco! Those were worth their weight in gold and hard to find compared to linksys pcmicia. And then having to do some ndis wrapper fun with linksys or intel cards. Wow. And even then, no packet injection!
- dylan604 4y ago>I was thinking what was the gold card Orinoco was one of those words that just stood out as it wasn't that common of a word in my daily vocabulary. Not needing to talk about rivers in South America, the only familiarity I had was from the Enya song. Everytime I'd insert the card into the slot, I'd sing "Sail away sail away" in my head.
- jandrese 4y agoI always remember PCMCIA as "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms". It's a bit of a shame that ExpressCard never got traction. I've had mixed success with USB Ethernet compared to the old PC-Card Ethernet.
- iszomer 4y agoThe fun days of using the ExpressCard slot to play AAA titles on a beat up Thinkpad or back when EVDO was the new hotness in mobile productivity..
- samstave 4y agoholy goodness I have not even thought about PCMCIA for like ~30 years!!
- poizan42 4y ago> I always remember PCMCIA as "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms". To be fair they did change the name of the standard to PC Card - people just kept using the old name anyways.
- jandrese 4y agoPCMCIA was an ISA bus on a card. PC-Card was PCI on a card. Then came Express Card, and no prize for guessing what the bus used there was. Express Card made the mistake of offering multiple form factors which made it harder for laptop manufacturers to support.
- nicolaslem 4y ago> I've had mixed success with USB Ethernet compared to the old PC-Card Ethernet. This may change thanks to USB 4 (and Thunderbolt) being able to directly use PCIe lanes.