Talk:PC Card

Name?

I had generally understood that PCMCIA originally stood for "Personal Computer Memory Card Industry Association", and was later changed to "International". However, I cannot find a good citation for this. There are still many links on the web that refer to "Industry Association", including hits from Sony, Cisco, Seagate, and others, but none provide definitive source for this. As well, I had not heard the use of "Peripheral Component MicroChannel Interconnect Architecture" before - is there a citation for this being an orignal use? Or is this merely a secondary use (a web search seems to indicate that this is an IBM (the company) specific acronym). I think this needs to be verified. GGG65 23:59, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

MCA Bus

Please verify this before moving back article

They were originally invented by the IBM in the 1980s, as a portable version of their (at the time) fast MCA bus^{[dubious  – discuss]}.

I moved the sentence about the cards originating from the MCA bus up to the top so it would be easier to spot as applying to PCMCIA, not ExpressCard (which it was originally under).

Still, does anyone have verification that this is true? Jleq 00:00, 21 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've been looking into this a little. The PCMCIA standards body makes no mention of IBM or the MCA Bus on their public web site http://www.pcmcia.org/about.htm. This seems like it would be an important thing to mention if it were in fact a contributing factor in their foundation. I nothing shows up within a week or two I'm going to remove this statement. Phatom87 02:10, 8 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Broken link

The Pccard standard and Cardbus whitepaper links are broken :(

ftp://ftp.sidewinder.com/pub/Portables/PCMCIA.

Deleted. I couldn't acces this. What is it, anyway? -- Merphant

FOLDOC

This article was a stub from FOLDOC

PCMCIA

Gee, and all this time I though PCMCIA stood for "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms". You learn something new every day, I guess! ClockworkTroll 05:17, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Xircom XJack

The Xircom XJack cards were not Type III cards. They were double height type II cards, so while they were as thick as a type III, they used the electrical interface of a type II. Lostchicken 20:46, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Type II and Type III have the same electrical interface. Type III means it is double the thickness of a Type II, so it is correct.

Wasn't it realport that was type 3 anyway, i thought XJack cards were type 2 hight with a pop out socket that could take a normal registered jack connector directly (the registered jack connector would stick out the top and bottom of the socket above and below the card). Plugwash 23:43, 15 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're right; my full-height RJ45/RJ11 Intel card has "Realport clone" in its docs somewhere... --Kiand 23:47, 15 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Type IV?

It seems a Type IV PCMCIA also existed, although I only know of one device that actually implemented the slot.

The ancient ThinkPad Dock II (3546)

ExpressCard pictures?

Can anyone contribute a picture showing the two types of ExpressCards? -- Bovineone 07:13, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

PCMCIA-to-PCI Adapters

I've just heard about PCMCIA-to-PCI adapters. I don't know much about that (does devices need specific drivers?, is there Linux support?), but I think this could be an interesting topic for this article. Best regards --surueña 10:42, 2 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Time Frame?

This article makes no mention of when (year) new PC card types were introduced, perhaps this should be worked on. NEMT 04:07, 4 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

More devices, drivers

Soundcards were made in 16 bit PC Card, in Type I and Type II. I know they were made in Type I because I used one in a Dell Latitude XPi P75D. (Most of them only support Windows through 98 or 98SE due to only having VXD type drivers.)

Video capture cards have been made in CardBus, usually Type II.

The Megahertz/3-Com/USR/Xircom X-Jack cards are Type II. The Type III card shown in the article is a Xircom RealPort, looks like it could be an Ethernet card. (Much 'fun' was had getting support for a dead USR 28.8 modem with X-Jack, originally bought in Scotland and brought to the USA before the company started selling USR products here with X-Jack.)

I've seen some older laptops with support for "Type IV" by having the upper slot extend higher than required to fit a Type III.

Quite uncommon are laptops which mount the slots side by side, allowing for at least one Type III card without blocking the second slot. (Toshiba made some laptop docking stations in the late 1990s with two Type III compatable CardBus slots.)

There's no mention of the many PC Card and CardBus adaptors made for desktop computers. Single slot ones (in PC Card for ISA, CardBus for PCI) are still used to adapt laptop wireless network cards for desktops, though dedicated PCI wireless cards are displacing them. Some of them use internal cables to connect to slots which mount in a drive bay. (I have an old ISA one that uses four 40pin ribbon cables to connect to a dual Type III slot dock in a 5.25" bay.)

There's no mention in the article of the complexity of software support for PC Card prior to Windows 95. DOS/Win 3.x required a driver for the controller chip and a 'Card and Socket Services' driver to enable the device drivers to communicate with the controller driver. Then for each device that would be used, either a 'Class Driver' or a 'Point Driver' was required. A Class Driver supported multiple devices of the same type, like memory cards or IDE hard drives. A Point Driver supported one specific device and a seperate Point Driver had to be loaded at boot for each device.

The drivers were not dynamically loaded and unloaded, they took up memory all the time. It wasn't practical for a user to have more than 3 or 4 devices to swap without creating a custom boot menu to choose which PC Card driver(s) to load for that session.

The complexity was to make it easier to write Class or Point drivers. The controller driver and Card and Socket Services were developed to create a uniform API on all PC compatable systems.

Windows 95 introduced dynamic driver handling where any number of PC Card devices could be inserted and drivers installed, then only loaded into memory as required, then unloaded when the user stopped the device. Ejecting the device without stopping it usually worked OK, but was (still is) not recommended for file storage devices with write access.

Not long after the release of Windows 95, PC Card chip makers ceased development of the DOS drivers, so it's not possible to get the PC Card slots to work with Windows 3.x on most laptops made from late 1995 on.

ExpressCard

What about to inform here something about ExpressCards? It's going to replace PCCards, right? I just bought a new notebook with this connector. The same size of my old PCMCIA, what confuses the end user. I was thinking that I was with something inside the notebook blocking my card. Then I looked inside and I could see something totally different. I went to the Internet and I could see that's actually a expressCard slot, which is different. Here, at Wikipedia, in this session about PCCard, I could not see a reference to ExpressCards. I'm not comfortable to write about it. So... here is a tip for people involved on this topic.

I expanded the section about non-compatibility with ExpressCard (and added the CardBay section as I needed to refer to it). I also removed the quote 'According to Tony Pierce of PCI-SIG, "PCI slots are going to be around for many, many years, there's a lot of investment in those cards."' as it has nothing to do with PCMCIA, PC Card, CardBus or ExpressCard - it is a quote about PCI vs. PCI Express. --Dermot Smith 11:03, 12 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Expansion

I moved the "expand" tag from the article to the talk page. What part of "This template may be found on the article's talk page" do you not understand? xompanthy 18:43, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

PCMCIA (Association)

I think that good idea is creating an article about PCMCIA (Association) instead of redirecting to PC Card.

Dead link

During several automated bot runs the following external link was found to be unavailable. Please check if the link is in fact down and fix or remove it in that case!

http://www.pcmcia.org/papers/new_bus.htm
- In PC card on Mon Jul 17 14:22:00 2006, 404 Not Found
- In PC card on Thu Jul 27 00:27:21 2006, 404 Not Found

maru (talk) contribs 04:27, 27 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Dead link

During several automated bot runs the following external link was found to be unavailable. Please check if the link is in fact down and fix or remove it in that case!

http://www.airhive.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=4nAlbum&file=index&do=showpic&pid=22&orderby=dateD
- In PC card on Mon Jul 17 14:22:03 2006, Socket Error: (-3, 'Temporary failure in name resolution')
- In PC card on Thu Jul 27 00:27:21 2006, Socket Error: (-3, 'Temporary failure in name resolution')

maru (talk) contribs 04:27, 27 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Rewrite

The present article appears to be three or four articles in really bad English mashed together. I've attempted a rewrite. Please re-add any important glossed-over detail - David Gerard 15:11, 21 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, and the thick card in the pic is definitely Type II - I took the picture :-) - David Gerard 15:36, 21 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In my Cisco college notes they told us that the profile of cardbus and PCMCIA are different and we had to identify them by shape. I don't have either to look at here and I can't remember the differences but a photo of both might be instructive. Secretlondon 14:43, 22 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If only one of us had a digital camera with a tripod and some of the relevant cards ... - David Gerard 15:35, 22 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hot Plugging?

No mention of hot-plugging? They support it, don't they? Did all types support hot-plugging? MrG (03 DEC 06) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 4.225.215.41 (talk • contribs) 15:09, 3 December 2006 (UTC).[reply]