On 10/3/17 4:25 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Q: was the card slot in the Poqet "PCMCIA"? ("People Can't Memorize
Computer Industry Acronyms" ("Personal Computer Memory Card Industry
Association", for those who want more formality))
Maybe later ones were, but the first ones were just "card slot" "that
happened to match PCMCIA when that came out
On Tue, 3 Oct 2017, Warner Losh wrote:
PC Cards, defined by the PCMICA standards body, appeared to always be
called that.
The slots in the Poqet predate the PCMCIA specification.
In the original release, Poqet NEVER mentioned "PCMCIA".
It seems likely/obvious? that the Poqet engineers worked from a
pre-release version of the spec, but they scrupulously avoided
mentioning that until after PCMCIA became "official"
They do seem the same as PCMCIA Type1, Rev1/0, other than that the
Poqet calls for cards that can handle lower voltage, and only work
with SRAM and ROM cards. The Poqet can NOT use a PCMCIA modem, SCSI
interface, etc.
The one that the CIS department at the college bought came with a ROM
card of Lotus! When the Poqet was sent back to Fry's for repairs soon
after, the Lotus card "disappeared" at Fry's.
The Poqet predates the PCMCIA spec, but products based on unapproved
drafts is hardly a new thing in the computer industry.
Stealing from Wikipedia -
"The PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association)
industry organization was based on the original initiative of the
British mathematician and computer scientist Ian Cullimore, one of the
founders of the Sunnyvale-based Poqet Computer Corporation, who was
seeking to integrate some kind of memory card technology as storage
medium into their early DOS-based palmtop PCs, when traditional floppy
drives and harddisks were found to be too power-hungry and large to fit
into their battery-powered handheld devices. When in July 1989, Poqet
contacted Fujitsu for their existing but still non-standardized SRAM
memory cards, and Intel for their flash technology, the necessity and
potential of establishing a worldwide memory card standard became
obvious to the parties involved. This led to the foundation of the
PCMCIA organization in September 1989."
alan
