PC Card (PCMCIA)

» see pc-card.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A PC Card was the size of a thick credit card and it slid into the side of a laptop until it clicked. The original was a 16-bit interface built on ISA, hot-pluggable and external at a time when adding anything to a computer meant a screwdriver and a reboot. It was designed for one job and ended up doing every job, which is the sentence that explains its whole life.

The one job was memory. Ian H. S. Cullimore, one of the founders of Poqet Computer in Sunnyvale, was building a DOS palmtop and needed storage that did not draw the power of a drive or take the space of one. In July 1989 Poqet went to Fujitsu about their SRAM cards and to Intel about flash, and it became obvious to everyone in the room that the useful thing was not a deal but a standard. PCMCIA was founded that September. By early 1990 roughly thirty companies had joined, IBM and Microsoft and Lotus among them, which is unusually fast agreement for an industry body.

The slot reached me at the wrong end of its life. Laptops were expensive here for a long time, and the generation of machine I could eventually justify arrived late enough that the radio was already soldered to the board, which is precisely the thing the slot had existed to sell you. What I actually saw of PC Card was the negative space it left behind: the plastic blank that shipped wedged in the opening and never came out, and a row of machines whose most-used expansion port was a hole with nothing in it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it became ~

Nobody could say PCMCIA, and the joke that it stood for People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms circulated widely enough that in March 1995 the association renamed the card to PC Card, keeping PCMCIA for itself. The same year brought CardBus, a 32-bit version built on PCI rather than ISA, which was backward compatible in the direction you wanted and not in the other one, so an old slot would refuse a new card and every support conversation of the late 1990s included that fact.

What went into the slots is the actual history. Modems, which is what most people bought first. Ethernet, back when a laptop having a network port was an option rather than an assumption. SCSI adapters, ISDN cards, hard disks, CompactFlash readers, television tuners, and eventually Wi-Fi, which arrived as a card with an ugly plastic bulge on the end holding the antenna. For roughly a decade the answer to what a laptop could not do was to buy a card, and that arrangement quietly made laptops upgradeable in a way they have not been since.

~ how it actually ended ~

PCMCIA killed its own product. ExpressCard came out of the same association in 2003, smaller and faster, running over USB and PCI Express instead of the old bus. Laptops carried both slots for a few years, then only the new one, then neither. That transition looks like a normal succession until you notice what happened underneath it: the reason to own an expansion card at all was evaporating at the same time, because Wi-Fi and Ethernet and card readers were moving onto the motherboard as standard equipment.

So the association ran out of a job. PCMCIA dissolved in 2009 after twenty years, and on 21 January 2010 the USB Implementers Forum announced it would take over the assets and keep the specifications maintained. ExpressCard outlived its parent by only a few years. The modern version of the slot is a USB port with a dongle hanging out of it, doing the same work with less dignity and none of the click.

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