ExpressCard

~ the goodbye ~

The PC Card slot had been on every serious laptop since 1990, and by the turn of the century it was holding the machine back. It was a parallel bus, 16-bit or CardBus 32-bit, and it was thick. The PCMCIA started work on the replacement in 2003 under the name NEWCARD and shipped it as ExpressCard: a slot with one lane of PCI Express and one USB 2.0 port wired to the back of it, so a card maker could pick whichever bus suited the device and the laptop did not have to care.

It came in two widths. ExpressCard/34 was 34 millimeters across, ExpressCard/54 was 54 and L-shaped so the narrow card fit either slot. USB mode gave 480 megabits a second, PCI Express mode 1.6 gigabits, and the 2.0 revision in 2009 doubled that. Compared to CardBus it was faster on every axis and cheaper to implement, because the two buses it exposed were buses the chipset already had.

I never bought one. By the time these slots were common I was at university on TTNet broadband, and the two things people around me actually put in an expansion slot were a cellular modem and, later, nothing, because the cellular modem became a USB stick you could move between machines. That is roughly the whole story of the standard compressed into one purchase nobody made.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the slot was for ~

The catalog was real: eSATA and FireWire and USB 3.0 controllers, gigabit ethernet for machines that shipped without it, TV tuners, sound cards for people who cared about latency, solid state drives, card readers, and 3G modems from every carrier that sold data. Later there were external graphics enclosures that hung a desktop video card off the single PCIe lane, which worked about as well as one lane suggests.

Every item on that list has the same problem. By 2010 the laptop already had ethernet and it already had four USB ports, and anything the slot could add, a dongle could add without opening the machine's side. An expansion slot is only valuable when the machine you bought is missing something. Laptops stopped missing things.

~ the quiet withdrawal ~

Manufacturers began dropping the slot as early as 2011. Apple was the loudest about it: the MacBook Pro lost the ExpressCard slot in its 17-inch model, and after June 2012 no Apple laptop had one. On the Windows side it lingered in business lines where the docking-station customer still asked for it, then went too.

The custodian died first. The PCMCIA disbanded in 2009 after nineteen years, and on 21 January 2010 the USB Implementers Forum announced it was taking over the assets and would keep the specifications maintained. Maintained turned out to mean stored. The last revision of the ExpressCard specification is dated 2009, and in 2018 the documents came off the USB-IF website with no announcement attached to their removal.

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