Hacker News Reader

Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com