#pcmcia

Stuck PCMCIA modem card in this Thinkpad belonging to @ms-dos5. All my strength and a pair of pliers would not get it to eject. It was stuck in there good, figured it might have been a 32-bit card in a 16-bit socket or something.

Took the whole thing apart to look for a lost screw, figured it was worth it to keep opening it up to see if an obvious way to remove the card was visible.

Nothing. But we did find the lost screw, it was wedged somewhere it shouldn't have been inside of the RF shielding.

Finally realized that adhesive between the card and the PCMCIA cage was what was holding the stupid thing in place. Wedged a small screwdriver in there and slowly worked the adhesive apart. Once that friction was removed, the spring shot the card right out of the socket.

You can see the residue on the text label there, after we finally got the stupid thing out of there.

Sadly, card is trashed for the effort. But hey, it's free, and the Thinkpad is fine. Fortunately modem cards are a dime a dozen, not much use for these things in 2025. It's the future now, or something.

Old laptops booting from PCMCIA

I recently mentioned PCMCIA linear memory cards (both SRAM and flash) that existed before PCMCIA controllers started to support IO devices and ATA. I used such an SRAM card in my Olivetti Quaderno subnotebook instead of its failed hard drive. Quaderno boots DOS from the internal ROM, loads a driver to support SRAM and allows using it as an additional drive. However, there were also laptops that supported booting from PCMCIA cards, and I am surprised that this feature was not uncommon.

Certain 386/486 laptops with Phoenix BIOS have “PCMCIA” in the boot device list (in addition to “hard drive” and “floppy drive”). These support just linear flash/SRAM cards and let you boot DOS out of the card mapped as A:. Everything works just fine and you don’t need to load any PCMCIA driver. ATA PCMCIA and CompactFlash drives are not supported here – they are ignored by the BIOS module.

The laptop with AMI BIOS could have an optional “PCMCIA Boot Function” module. Once it was enabled and a card was inserted, the system booted from PCMCIA and mapped the card again as A:. However, the support was flaky – just good enough to load a proper PCMCIA driver during OS boot.

Ein Semester lang habe ich das kompakteste, aber nutzloseste Laptop der philosophischen Fakultät

Zum Studium bringe ich schon mein erstes Laptop ins Wohnheim mit, damals noch bei Aldi gekauft, mit 15-Zoll-Bildschirm, und WLAN gab es nur per zusätzlicher PCMCIA-Steckkarte. Definitiv zu groß, um es auch in die Uni mitzunehmen. Auf eBay finde ich ein Gerät mit sensationellen Maßen: 6,4-Zoll-Bildschirm, 1024*768-Auflösung, 128 Megabyte RAM – und das ganze auf 18 cm * 14 cm * 5 cm bei unter 900 Gramm: Ein Sony Vaio PCG-U1, kaum zwei Jahre alt. Für wenige hundert Euro (also für erstes Semester sehr viel Geld) ersteigere ich das Gerät, das sogar in die kleine Tasche vorne an meiner Aktentasche paßt.

Die wesentliche Funktion: Bewunderung auslösen. So ein süßer kleiner Rechner! Ohnehin hat kaum jemand (zumindest in den Geisteswissenschaften, wo ich mich bewege) einen Laptop dabei. Und wenn, dann eher sehr klobige Geräte in Leitzordnergröße. Der praktische Nutzen ist dennoch sehr begrenzt: Die Tastatur viel zu klein, Windows 95 ist in Desktopproportionen auf einem winzigen Bildschirm nahezu unbedienbar, an Internet unterwegs ist ohnehin nicht zu denken, die unter 900 Gramm werden dann doch deutlich mehr, wenn noch ein Netzteil dazukommt, und so richtig stromlinienförmig ist das Gerät schon dann nicht, wenn der Akku angesteckt ist (was in der Uni ganz nützlich wäre, weil es Steckdosen nur in der Bibliothek gibt). Das Killerfeature, also das Feature, das die Nützlichkeit endgültig gekillt hat, ist aber die Bootzeit: Es dauert mehrere Minuten, bis das Gerät arbeitsfähig ist. Kompakt nützt sehr wenig, wenn man nicht mal eben an- und ausschalten kann.

Nach dem ersten Semester wandert das Gerät also wieder zurück zu eBay. Immerhin: Der Preis ist recht konstant geblieben, der Spaß hat mich kaum Geld gekostet. Das Experiment Laptop an der Uni ist damit für mich aber abgeschlossen, und zwar bis zum Ende meines Studiums. Meine Geräte wurden bis dahin tatsächlich immer kompakter und nutzbarer, aber bevor sie so kompakt und nutzbar wurden, daß sich immer dabei gelohnt hätte, kamen ordentliche Smartphones auf den Markt.

PCMCIA 1.0, SRAM and linear flash cards

Although mounting remote HDDs over a serial cable to my Olivetti Quaderno was a nice solution, it was not very fast. I wanted to add persistent storage using a PCMCIA card, but Quaderno has just PCMCIA 1.0. I used to work a lot with PCMCIA, but it was always the newer standard (2.0) typical for 386/486 laptops. PCMCIA 1.0 does not support IO devices (so no ethernet cards) or CompactFlash cards (as they are IO cards in the ATA mode). PCMCIA 1.0 can work only with linear memory mapped cards. For linear flash cards, there were two incompatible standards (FTL and MS FFS). SRAM cards had just a single standard. In addition to all of this, simpler devices (industrial, embedded) required attribute memory on the card in order to work at all (fortunately, this laptop supports full Card Services and does not need it).

I took a 4MB PCMCIA SRAM expansion from my Amiga 600 and put it in Quaderno. The ROMDOS drive contains a Microsoft program called MEMCARD.exe (very similar to FDISK.exe, but for early PCMCIA cards), so I used it to format the card, rebooted the machine and got 4MB of persistent storage (the SRAM card has a battery to retain the data even after removing the card from the computer).

These early PCMCIA cards don’t work in Windows out of the box. However, there is already a DOS driver included in Windows 9x. You just need to add two lines in the config.sys and you can use the SRAM card in a “more modern vintage computer” (it still allows you to use the slot with other cards and use hot-plug features). Btw these direct mapped SRAM cards have one big advantage – they are super-fast.