Slashdot Mirror

What you are looking for is called Zoom-Video(ZV). It was added to PCMCIA before CardBus came around but unfortunately not all laptops supprt this standard.

I was about to tell you that they were all EXTREMELY overpriced($200+), and that pretty much all the Zoom-Video cards had been discontinued (a.k.a iRez's Capsure. However I froogled and found a Nogatech ConferenceCard that seems like it would do the trick for under $30! Anyhoo, I've never used the Nogatech card and they have gone out of business so definately make sure it will work for you.

The PCMCIA folks, who are behind this ExpressCard thing, want $349 USD for a copy of the standard, and it is only available in electronic form.

I can understand a small printing fee for a dead-tree copy. But sheesh, when will these guys follow the lead of the IEEE on the 802. standards and just open them up?

Besides the confusion you see here, one may note that ExpressCard, besides the name, is not new at all. It was originaly named "NEWCARD" and announced 2 years ago.

FYI, you can find more about its history here, here, and here.

It's Personal Memory Card International Association, but nobody cares.

No, I don't know where that extra C came from.

Um...didn't it go the other way around? pc-card.com redirects to pcmcia.org, so by the same logic "PC Card" is an old term and PCMCIA is the new one. Am I missing something?

Lack of WinXP support is exactly what Microsoft promised last year ... see the May (?) WinHEC slides on the topic, where they described their ship criteria. Basically, no OS support till host controllers and devices have been available for a while, and drivers are proven. This isn't news.

It's only this month that USB 2.0 host controllers have begun to be available from vendors, as PCI addin cards. (Belkin, Orange.) I've yet to see USB 2.0 devices of any kind be advertised for walk-in cash purchases. Wait till the summer before you expect to see these devices ... like IDE-speed disk access. (480 Mbit/sec ~= 60 MByte/sec, in the same range as ATA/66.)

Firewire advocacy aside, USB 2.0 clearly has a future. It's faster, and when you buy a system with USB 2.0 support built in, it'll have the same connector you know about. Devices are forward and backward compatible. And finally having conformance testing is a good thing, too.

And let's not forget the next generation of PCMCIA devices, "CardBay" ... the first generation was ISA-on-a-Stick, then came PCI-on-a-Stick, next time it's USB 2.0 going out those familiar connectors. Cheaper than PCI/Cardbus support. See http://www.pcmcia.org/cardbay.htm

Not sure what PCMICA stands for, but PCMCIA stands for Personal Computer Memory Card International Association .

Or, if you prefer: People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.