3Com modem - Ethernet PCMCIA in IBM 9547

The Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA) was a group of computer hardware manufacturers, operating under that name from 1989 to 2009. Starting with the PCMCIA card in 1990 (the name later simplified to ''PC Card''), it created various standards for peripheral interfaces designed for

laptop A laptop, laptop computer, or notebook computer is a small, portable personal computer (PC) with a screen and alphanumeric keyboard. Laptops typically have a clam shell form factor with the screen mounted on the inside of the upper li ...

computers.

History

The PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association) industry organization was based on the original initiative of the British mathematician and computer scientist Ian H. S. Cullimore, one of the founders of the

Sunnyvale Sunnyvale () is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwest Santa Clara County in the U.S. state of California. Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101 and is bordered by portions of San Jose to the nort ...

-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 is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the la ...

for their existing but still non-standardized SRAM memory cards, and

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...

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. By early 1990, some thirty companies had joined the initiative already, including Poqet, Fujitsu, Intel,

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, IBM, Lotus,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

and

SCM Microsystems SCM may refer to: Organizations * SCM Corporation, an American typewriter and calculator manufacturer * SCM Holdings, a holding company owned by Ukrainian tycoon Rinat Akhmetov * SCM Press, a UK-based academic publisher of theology * Securities ...

. From 1990 onwards, the association published and maintained a sequence of standards for parallel communication peripheral interfaces in

computers, notably the PCMCIA card, later renamed to

PC Card In computing, PC Card is a configuration for computer parallel communication peripheral interface, designed for laptop computers. Originally introduced as PCMCIA, the PC Card standard as well as its successors like CardBus were defined and devel ...

, and succeeded by ExpressCard (2003), all of them now technologically obsolete. The PCMCIA association was dissolved in 2009 and all of its activities have since been managed by the USB Implementers Forum, according to the PCMCIA website.

Name

PCMCIA stands for ''Personal Computer Memory Card International Association'', the group of companies that defined the standard. This acronym was difficult to say and remember, and was sometimes jokingly referred to as ''"People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms"''. To recognize increased scope beyond memory, and to aid in marketing, the association acquired the rights to the simpler term "

" from IBM. This was the name of the standard from version 2 of the specification onwards. These cards were used for wireless networks,

modem A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by modulating one or more c ...

s, and other functions in notebook PCs.

References

External links

* {{authority control Solid-state computer storage media Motherboard PCMCIA Standards organizations in the United States Computer-related introductions in 1990