This post reminded me how much I always loved PCMCIA, as a standard.
The hardware was the size of a candy bar. There was space for a big colorful sticker on the flat side. The insertion force had a very satisfying feeling. The all metal cases made them feel substantial and expensive.
Big, colorful, tactile. They were the vinyl albums of the PC world.
Yes, though there was a common enough problem with different types of cards (PCMCIA 5v and 3.3v and CardBus), the standard was similar and (badly made/worn down) sockets allowed to insert (partially) the wrong type of card, that would get stuck.
I'd noticed that, too. When I sold all my PCMCIA and CardBus cards, the set of them (excluding the plastic double-height RealPort cards) made a striking stack in my hand, of very compact modular functionality. It's almost tempting to collect them, like trading cards.
The only thing I didn't like was the Ethernet connectors. So many fragile and mutually incompatible dongles. The double height cards avoided this issue, but they were fairly short lived.
Of course now it is the USB port that is fragile instead, so when it breaks it requires a full mainboard replacement.
I genuinely cannot tell if that's sarcasm or not; if a serious claim, I'd love to see some comparisons, on both the socket and on the cable side (i.e. with Micro and Mini USB, it was not typically the socket that gave way, but the flimsy connector on the cable, which is generally my fear with USB-C cables as well. USB-A, I never ever ever had an issue or fear with either cable or socket).
Tbh it felt like EOMA68 ran out of money due to constant Yak shaving.
For example, instead of sourcing a stock of the increasingly hard to get DDR memory chips, time and money was spent on designing a completely new 3d printer based on new mechanics for printing the laptop parts.
No commercial printer was good enough and neither was any 3d printing service.
Due to the time spent on thimgs like this more and more parts went obsolete and manufacturing became harder.
Still waiting for my EOMA68-A20 card that runs Debian.
That's disappointing, I remember seeing the project at the time and thinking (a) it was an absolutely awesome idea and (b) it was a bit too ambitious and needed to keep a limited scope to be successful. The laptop chassis would have been a great phase 2 after getting the compute module out into the world. The 3D printer story sounds like they might have lost sight of the apple pie while they were inventing the universe.
I still miss the expresscards. I'm suprised the standard didn't evolve using newer version of PCI-E, maybe it could have become a way to add more storage to laptop easily.
With USB 3.0+ though, it seems obvious why it may have died out when better connectors became available.
USB is great, but lovely thing about those cards was they were standard and internal. I still very much miss UltraBays and PCMCIA/Express Cards as an easy way to expand a laptop. My modern Thinkpad is not meaningfully smaller than my T420s (i.e. it's smaller but not in a way that expands/changes my usage of it), but with T420s I could change battery and DVD/HDD/SDD with a single button and reconfigure it as needed.
Don't forget that there is a SECOND mSata slot for the WiFi chip (easily replaced) and of course you can replace the default HDD with a nice modern SSD as well :-)
Damn thing can even take a sim card!
And of course there is eSATA on the back as well so you can theoretically have tons of drives running on their native bus.
I know what you mean, although I think it has been long enough that you forgot just how bad many of the connectors were (or you were tipped off and did the sensible thing and only got cards with a larger section outside the system with a full size connector). There seemed to be a common connector on 80+% of the cards that would break (no longer make full contact) in at most two years, if you were extremely careful.
The hardware was the size of a candy bar. There was space for a big colorful sticker on the flat side. The insertion force had a very satisfying feeling. The all metal cases made them feel substantial and expensive.
Big, colorful, tactile. They were the vinyl albums of the PC world.