PC Card is a technical standard specifying an expansion card interface for laptops and PDAs. The PCMCIA originally introduced the 16-bit ISA-based PCMCIA Card in 1990, but renamed it to PC Card in March 1995 to avoid confusion with the name of the organization. The CardBus PC Card was introduced as a 32-bit version of the original PC Card, based on the PCI specification. CardBus slots are backward compatible, but older slots are not forward compatible with CardBus cards. Although originally designed as a standard for memory-expansion cards for computer storage, the existence of a usable general standard for notebook peripherals led to the development of many kinds of devices including network cards, modems, and hard disks. The PC Card port has been superseded by the ExpressCard interface since 2003, which was also initially developed by the PCMCIA. The organization dissolved in 2009, with its assets merged into the USB Implementers Forum.
Applications
Many notebooks in the 1990s had two adjacent type-II slots, which allowed installation of two type-II cards or one, double-thickness, type-III card. The cards were also used in early digital SLR cameras, such as the Kodak DCS 300 series. However, their original use as storage expansion is no longer common. Some manufacturers such as Dell continued to offer them into 2012 on their ruggedized XFR notebooks. Mercedes-Benz used a PCMCIA card reader in the W221 S-Class for model years 2006–2009. It was used for reading media files such as MP3 audio files to play through the COMAND infotainment system. After 2009, it was replaced with a standard SD Card reader. Some vehicles from the 2010s from Honda and Nissan included a PC Card reader integrated into the audio system. Some Japanese brand consumer entertainment devices such as TV sets include a PC Card slot for playback of media. Most TVs with satellite reception feature a Conditional-access module which is a PC Card slot for decoding channels. Adapters for PC Cards to Personal Computer ISA slots were available when these technologies were current. Cardbus adapters for PCI slots have been made. These adapters were sometimes used to fit Wireless (802.11) PCMCIA cards into desktop computers with PCI slots. The Taito G-NET arcade hardware, based on the original PlayStation, uses PC Card as a software distribution method to allow games to be replaced without total replacement of the arcade board. Konami also used the PC Card on their System 573 hardware, also based on the original PlayStation, for similar purposes. Early PlayStation 2 models in Japan (SCPH-10000, SCPH-15000 and SCPH-18000) included a PC Card slot for installing a network adapter (PC Card version; SCPH-10190) and an external hard disk drive (SCPH-20400); this was replaced by the Expansion Bay on later models (SCPH-3000x onwards).
History
Before the introduction of the PCMCIA card, the parallel port was commonly used for portable peripherals. The PCMCIA 1.0 card standard was published by the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association in November 1990 and was soon adopted by more than eighty vendors. It corresponds with the Japanese JEIDA memory card 4.0 standard. It was originally developed to support Memory cards. Intel authored the Exchangeable Card Architecture (ExCA) specification, but later merged this into the PCMCIA. SanDisk (operating at the time as "SunDisk") launched its PCMCIA card in October 1992. The company was the first to introduce a writeable Flash RAM card for the HP 95LX (an early MS-DOS pocket computer). These cards conformed to a supplemental PCMCIA-ATA standard that allowed them to appear as more conventional IDE hard drives to the 95LX or a PC. This had the advantage of raising the upper limit on capacity to the full 32 MB available under DOS 3.22 on the 95LX. New Media Corporation was one of the first companies established for the express purpose of manufacturing PC Cards; they became a major OEM for laptop manufacturers such as Toshiba and Compaq for PC Card products. It soon became clear that the PCMCIA card standard needed expansion to support "smart" I/O cards to address the emerging need for fax, modem, LAN, harddisk and floppy disk cards. It also needed interrupt facilities and hot plugging, which required the definition of new BIOS and operating system interfaces. This led to the introduction of release 2.0 of the PCMCIA standard and JEIDA 4.1 in September 1991, which saw corrections and expansion with Card Services (CS) in the PCMCIA 2.1 standard in November 1992. To recognize increased scope beyond memory, and to aid in marketing, the association acquired the rights to the simpler term "PC Card" from IBM. This was the name of the standard from version 2 of the specification onwards. These cards were used for wireless networks, modems, and other functions in notebook PCs. After the release of PCIe-based ExpressCard in 2003, laptop manufacturers started to fit ExpressCard slots to new laptops instead of PC Card slots.
Form factors
All PC Card devices use a similar sized package which is 85.6 millimetres (3.37 in) long and 54.0 millimetres (2.13 in) wide, the same size as a credit card.
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