PCMCIA cards....

[AdmiralAK]

OK can someone help me out here....

1) What the heck does this acronym mean ?

second....

2) I have been looking at airport, is the airport card a genuenly new invention or is it based on a PCMCIA concept

and lastly..

3) Why the heck don't non-portable macs have PCMCIA slots? It seems to me that it would be easier for connectivity's sake. Say all your PCI slots are filled and you want to connect some serial device to your mac (and you dont have a serial card in one of your PCI slots)... you could have just gotten a PCMCIA cad, put it in, use the device that you wanted to use, and then if you wanted you could remove the card and store it, or just leave it in your mac....

What do you people think ???

[kampl]

PCMCIA is an I/O standard developed around 1989 or 1990 I believe. It stands for Personal Computer Memory Card International Association IIRC. Adopted by laptop/notebook manufacturers mainly because of it's small size (smaller than a deck of cards and a few millimeter thick), low power usage, and interchangeability between laptops/notebooks.

As for the Airport card. It's my understanding that it's more or less equivalent to Lucent's Wavelan 802.11 cards.

Generally you don't see PCMCIA cards in destops and towers, because of the fact that you you don't need the space and weight savings they offer. They also tend to be considerably more expensive to make than PCI cards.