Pcmcia Pico W Card
yyzkevin.com
yyzkevin.com
One of my favorite deployments of it was to make a router out of a laptop - and use two of the xircom realport "mating" cards to give the laptop two real rj45 ports without any dongles:
https://www.premisesnetworks.com/doc/pc-card-0008
... combine that with an already existing rj45 on the laptop and you had a three-port gateway with a built-in KVM and a built-in UPS.
And then having to do some ndis wrapper fun with linksys or intel cards. Wow.
And even then, no packet injection!
Orinoco was one of those words that just stood out as it wasn't that common of a word in my daily vocabulary. Not needing to talk about rivers in South America, the only familiarity I had was from the Enya song. Everytime I'd insert the card into the slot, I'd sing "Sail away sail away" in my head.
It's a bit of a shame that ExpressCard never got traction. I've had mixed success with USB Ethernet compared to the old PC-Card Ethernet.
To be fair they did change the name of the standard to PC Card - people just kept using the old name anyways.
Express Card made the mistake of offering multiple form factors which made it harder for laptop manufacturers to support.
This may change thanks to USB 4 (and Thunderbolt) being able to directly use PCIe lanes.
What's faster? The dual-core Cortex M0+ at 133MHz in his "wifi card"? Or the Intel 80486SX at 33MHz in his laptop?
You can approach 0.8 IPC on 486, assuming you know about AGI stalls and other quirks.
General 486-era C-compiler produced code, though, would be lucky to hit 0.4 IPC.
But it's been over 25 years since I last wrote asm for a 486 CPU.
the 1541 disk drive that you would pair with a Commodore 64. It had a 6502 CPU in it, and was clocked a little faster than the 6510 CPU in the C64 itself.
The Apple LaserWriter'ss 68k cpu was clocked at 12Mhz, intended to be used with Macs having a 68k CPU clocked around 7.8Mhz.
My current project is mapping out 80's HELLA cruise control units. They have just a few inputs and variables. Speed, brake signal, pump, clutch signal, and on mine, an additional signal to the APC to show it is engaged (to limit boost). Really, I think I'll be able to make this work - hopefully smoothly!
EDIT: these were in Saabs, but also other manufacturers like Land Cruiser and I think BMW as well. HELLA sold these as OES for these vehicles.
Current wireless APs are backwards compatible to 802.11b and in some cases also 802.11a, usually covering every standard between that and whatever the new standard was when they hit the market. For example, this Netgear AP and router in its spec sheet says specifically "- Backwards compatible with 802.11a/b/ g/n/ac WiFi". It's just not on the main feature list that's shortened for marketing. https://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/RAX38/RAX38v2_DS...
So I get the idea of a faster network connection on PCMCIA, up to the point that the 486 can actually use it anyway. I understand the coolness factor and the fun of solving this puzzle. I just don't understand the stated need. It's a lot of work compared to just connecting. The bigger deal for me would be this old laptop and card speaking WEP rather than WPA3.
As I understood, this is exactly helping with not having to use WEP. The Pico is simulating a NE2000 ethernet card, so any old pre-WPA Windows98 drivers are not used at all, but with the Pico doing ethernet-to-wifi conversion and WPA2 encryption.
They even had CF/PCMICA wifi cards for PDA's and such. While this thread/topic isn't about that or such, I rushed to recall netsumbler and wardriving.
It's interesting that SDIO has survived to this day as an interface. Just mostly staying on the same board between some SoC and peripherals.
It's a Ricoh Chandra in disguise! https://aichi.to/~thinkpad/tp235/index.html
Still, great work comes out of chaos.