PCMCIA (PC Card & CardBus)

Overview

A connector becoming increasingly popular, mainly on portable PC's but more recently on desktop PC's is the credit-card slot the PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association !) slot

Alternative definition:
"People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms"!!

Features

Hot swappable - able to be plugged and unplugged while the computer is running.(in theory!!)

PC Card (PCMCIA)

5 Volt, 16 bit/8MHz

Cardbus standard

Physically same sizes as PC Cards
3.3Volts, 32bit at 33MHz
Able to communicate with other Cardbus cards bypassing the CPU.
(Keall, et al 1996)

[PC Cards from 3-Com www.3com.com/pccard]
3com (1997 Jun)

Types

There are three official and one unofficial types;

Type 1 (3.3mm) approved 1990 commonly used as a memory extender, solid state disk drives

Type 2 (5.0mm) approved 1991 used for fax, modem, local area network attachment and encryption processing

Type 3 (10.5mm) rotating storage medium (eg. Hard Disk)

Type 4 (16mm) larger Hard Disks)

Ref: [4] NZ PC World, Aug 1993