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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

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?

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...

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.

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 :)

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