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Comment by pram | Hacker News Reader

The fact that it sticks out on the side made me realize these Framework dongles are basically neo-PCMCIA cards lol

I wonder why there was never a standardized PCIE 'card' format? Seems like the perfect thing for extra storage with NVME being so common these days.

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> I wonder why there was never a standardized PCIE 'card' format? Seems like the perfect thing for extra storage with NVME being so common these days.

The best thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. The closest analogue is the ExpressCard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExpressCard), but there's also the internal-only M.2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2), which is the most common non-server format for NVMe; mini-PCIe (similar to M.2, used mostly for wireless); SD express (SD cards, but with PCIe); and CFexpress (CompactFlash cards, but with PCIe).

I have a thinkpad p71 with an Expresscard x1 slot and can't figure out what to use it for since the laptop has so much existing IO out of the box.

It would have been nice if framework adopted this existing standard and started making their own express card modules instead of making their own USBC thing that doesn't fit in any other laptop.

I had the IBM "Modem and Ethernet" PCMCIA card. And a scsi one to work that zip drive on my notebook. They were awkward, but they worked.

for those that haven't seen these thick credit card sized adapters from the last century..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Card

I do have a vague recollection of having a lot of "fun" running Linux on an old laptop that for some reason had a PCMCIA WiFi card(I think the onboard one might have been dead or something? Or it was so damn old it never had one).

Harder times, sure. But also simpler, because at least the mainstream distros back then weren't so damn convoluted and it could never take me more than 30 seconds to change the DNS servers permanently. I set up NextDNS on my Pop OS laptop recently and it took me 2 hours of dicking around with systemd.

Starting to yearn back to Arch Linux again... At least with that I actually know what I'm running under the hood...

Wifi came about around the time that every laptop, even small ones, had PCMCIA/cardbus slots and USB was fairly new as well, being used mainly for keyboards, mice, and joysticks. I remember having to buy a PCI USB card for my workstation because the motherboard didn't come with any USB ports even though it was less than a year old.

You'll likely have to switch to an Arch-like distro as Arch is systemd nowadays too.

It is by default, but it's completely possible to switch to another init.

These were great back in the day. I had a 3G one which was super quick at the time and meant no bothering with bad client wifi.

There was: ExpressCard. Nobody liked it.

Oh my gosh, no! Those of us who needed it did like it a lot, and PC Cards before it. But PCMCIA disbanded in 2009, ExpressCard 2.0 failed to catch fire, and USB got "good enough". And now it's apparently acceptable to parade around one's dongles in public.

Many PCMCIA/ExpressCard solutions also used dongles. Dongles are unsightly but USB-C/Thunderbolt with a dongle can really replace anything that an ExpressCard could do, and more.

>Thunderbolt with a dongle can really replace anything that an ExpressCard could do, and more.

What can tb do that express card could not?

Basically everything added to TB over its various revisions are things EC can't do because EC was discontinued. 12.5x the bandwidth? Sharing a port with USB? USB-PD out of the same connector?

And PCMCIA before that. I did like it actually. I used these cards to add wifi to laptops that didn't have it, and later in the ExpressCard days it was a cheap way to add USB 3.0.

Its real replacement is Thunderbolt though! That's basically PCIe.

I had a PCMCIA modem :)

Currently rocking an ExpressCard to 3x USB-3 adapter in my 2007 Core 2 Duo laptop, with my laptop motherboard modified to supply 5V to the two reserved EC pins, and the EC modified to pull 5V from the two pins instead of generating 500mA of 5V using a boost converter. The card works fine on Linux and is noticeably faster than USB 2.0, but the drivers blue-screen on Vista and I have not tested on 7 (the laptop is too old for proper drivers, and today is more of a toy and novelty than a proper tool, but Linux Mint MATE runs excellently still).

Update: the FL1000 USB3 drivers work fine on Windows 7.

I absolutely loved expresscard. So many crazy projects from the last decade wouldn't have been possible without it. I had an "eGPU" on a laptop back in 2012 by hooking up a riser card to an expresscard slot [1]. The image quality was atrocious and the stuttering almost gave me a stroke, but it was still neat to use a desktop video card with a laptop.

The best part about EC was that there was no "handshakes" or any other software layer nonsense like you get with Thunderbolt, it was just plain old PCIe and it just worked. Every device you plugged in was fully "native" to the system and didn't require any screwy stuff to work right. SAS controllers just worked. 4x network cards just worked. Serial cards just worked.

These days, my old Dell workstation is on its last legs, it's looking like EC is a dead end. It's a shame, because I doubt we'll ever see that level of simplicity for connecting random devices to our computers again. Yes, the connector sucked and the form factor was awkward, but it really had a special place to me.

[1] https://images-fe.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51cyhJ95LsL...

I had a red Xlinx? PC card in a... Gateway? laptop around the turn of the century cough cough. Stuck out just like this, but no dongle!

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