PicoPCMCIA – a PCMCIA development board for retro-computing enthusiasts | Hacker News Reader

PicoPCMCIA – a PCMCIA development board for retro-computing enthusiasts

yyzkevin.com

116 pointsrbanffy28 comments

I was able to see the development card in person at VCF Midwest last year; it's a very neat project! The version he had at VCFMW was in a transparent plastic case[1], which looks even better than the IBM-inspired design of the one on this page.

[1] https://youtu.be/hF0NKvmQmVA?t=47 (I couldn't find a good picture elsewhere)

Edit - I found this video on his YouTube channel with more info (with the latest version of the card): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-04EoGlayY

The RP2XXX microcontrollers are so incredible in terms of what it's opened to hobbyists. I hope microcontroller-based computers become a thing.

Agreed. The price point and PIOs really open a lot of possibilities, especially with the amazing tooling that is available.

It's more a matter of exposing hobbyists of one vertical to what exists in another. Low-power RISC microcontrollers and microprocessors were superseded in popularity by the ease of a Raspberry Pi SBCs running Linux, that could act as a host to its own development.

Now that Raspberry Pi has entered the market, hobbyists that were only familiar with SBCs are now being introduced to the flexibility of Low-power RISC microcontrollers and microprocessors.

There's also some new products on the market that are the best of both worlds, with the system-in-package form factors and easy bare-metal development of the RP2XXX line, that still have the ability to run full Linux, like the Bouffalo Labs BL808 and the Sophgo SG2000. Check out the Ox64 from Pine64 (https://pine64.com/product/128mb-ox64-sbc-available-on-decem...) or the Duo series from MilkV (https://milkv.io/duo) for breakout boards and development boards.

For those who aren't aware what PCMCIA stands for: People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

"For those who have forgotten..."

If you want to refresh an old memory, it actually stands for "Personal Computer Memory Card International Association" but nobody knew that. And it was later called 'PC Card'... then there was the faster ExpressCard that wasn't backwards compatible.

It was fun being able to expand your computer's IO capabilities by adding on a network card, modem, USB, FireWire, etc. with these modules. It's similar to Framework's little USB-C-based modules, though those modules are just too small for a lot of circuits without a very creative design.

My understanding (probably wrong) is that pcmcia was based off the ISA bus and then pc card updated to pci based and express card was pcie

Close! The PC Card rename was because people were confusing the name of the association with the specific form factor.

PCMCIA and PC Card = ISA

CardBus = PCI and ISA - slot was backwards compatible so you could use a PC Card in a CardBus slot

ExpressCard = PCIe

Ah, completely forgot about CardBus. That was a fun time when we also had NuBus kicking around on some older Macs, too.

That's also not a perfect recollection, but is what my recollection was until I was looking up this history in the past week and found this nugget and posted it elsewhere. Quoting myself:

>So we know these were originally called PCMCIA cards, then later PC Cards, right? Well, I think I might have found the first mention of PCMCIA in PC Magazine. It is in a Dec 1991 column by Dvorak where he "introduces" the "PCMCIA PC-Card". Here's a quote, "In fact, the card should be referred to as the PCMCIA PC-Card, or the PC-Card for short. PCMCIA is the Personal Computer Computer Memory Card International Association (Sunnyvale, Calif., 408-720-0107), and it's the governing body that has standardized the specifications for this card worldwide. JEIDA works with the PCMCIA; it's specifications are identical."

>So at least according this Dvorak column, these were ALWAYS properly called "PC-Cards" (he used a hyphen), but early on people definitely were calling them PCMCIA cards and I remember the shift to everyone later (much later than this 1991 column) calling them PC Cards.

Neat, definitely a part of history that I'm not familiar enough with myself since I was only ~6 or so around then when the article was published.

It definitely seems to reinforce the joke backronym of "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms" for the whole thing given how badly it was all refered to. It's a lot like the whole Clippit/Clippy situation with the Microsoft Office assistants. Originally it was only named Clippit but Clippy got coined by everyone else and even Microsoft ended up giving in and using it in marketing materials not too long after the fact.

And obviously PicoPCMCIA means "very small people can't memorize computer industry acronyms".

(Or possibly s/computer/complicated/, that's how I remembered it at least.)

I thrifted a shirt once that said it stood for "Peppy Cheerleaders Move Crowds into Anarchy". Wish I still had it!

I love this project. It will bring great audio to a bunch of Pentium-era laptops and essentially expand this list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpd2CM3_384.

Problem with them, for the most part, will be about rebuilding the batteries and dealing with the poor quality of old screens.

I love the IBM aesthetic on the card artwork.

Awesome !!

I have an old Thinkpad and had a similar idea for wifi, but I was thinking about MiniPCI.

Emulating NE2000 is great :)

A dream device for 486 and pentium laptop enthusiasts. Got in line to get one.

I had a small bugfix in a PCMCIA driver for the Linux kernel, and I was thinking the other day that nobody uses it any more. But I guess they still are!

And it'll be open sourced once everything is done!

this looks sick as hell. i wonder whether there are viable NE2000 drivers for PowerBooks running classic Mac OS? modern WiFi (even limited by PCMCIA) might be preferable to era-appropriate WiFi. not much you can get an Orinoco card to talk to these days if you can even find one.

Look for Asante FriendlyNet drivers perhaps -- these were Mac OS 7.5+ compatible NE2000 cards.

If you have a PowerBook with SCSI support you can use a BlueSCSI v2. Besides emulating SCSI storage devices it can emulate a Dynaport SCSI/Link network device to allow wifi connectivity for Macs running classic Mac OS. https://bluescsi.com/docs/WiFi-DaynaPORT

tangent but inspired by this: what about a retro-console development board? like saturn or playstation, would that be hard to do?

obviously this is way over my head, would be great if LLMs can help noobs

I think this is something like that, https://github.com/webhdx/PicoBoot. RP2040 for the Gamecube. Mostly they are using it for booting homebrew but I don't see why you couldn't edit the code and do anything you want with it.

Well, mister has psx core.

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/PSX_MiSTer

TIL the Newton had a PCMCIA slot!

The Newtons from the OMP to the 130 had a single PCMCIA slot. The MP2000 and 2100 had two slots.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com