I got this one as a promo piece with a P4 Northwood laptop I bought back in 2001. It was quite useful at the time, being much larger than any other comparable flash drive that was available - a 256MB CF card would have set you back around $110 or so from a reputable dealer.
I don't have anything capable of reading this anymore, so whatever is on it shall remain a secret. A new 512GB flash drive from Microcenter is shown for comparison, and it was $40.
PCMCIA stands for 'People Can't Memorize Computer Industry's Acronyms'
I thought the C was for "complicated".
We developed PCMCIA cards around 1990-on in coordination with Fujitsu IIRC at National Semiconductor. It was the hot new thing at the time at my site. There were other semiconductor companies racing to get their versions marketable at the same time.
It was kind of sad to see it finally die, but I guess things got cheap enough you could integrate almost anything into a system.
It was exciting at the time. Unfortunately, I was involved in other projects while the PCMCIA development work was in progress, but I was very interested in all of the new tech my department was working on and stayed enlightened at arms length.
That’s like some Johnny Mnemonic shit right there.
Remember SCSI Removable drives. Syquest 44 and 88 MB? Hell, I couldn't even store a RAW image on one now.
I do remember those old drive. I still have a machine with a 10MB RLL drive around here somewhere.
I still have a Zip disk with the only known copy of a giant piece of industrial software on it that I wrote.
Zip drive anyone? And the drivers for it?
I had one up until recently. I helped dispose of a former employer's data assets. I doubt it worked, tho.
I got a batch of disks and drives out of school auction in 2008. I sold them on craigslist for a mint for the next decade, that and FireWire stuff. I left all that when I departed the west but it was good time.
PCMCIA was a game changer, but fuck if I didn't hate it with every fiber of my being. Might have just been me, but every device I'd insert into the slot never engaged correctly. I'd fiddle fuck with them for what seemed hours before they seated properly. Modems were the worst. I was so happy when USB arrived.
was this before floppy drives?
I may have had an early MP3 player that used one of these hard drives.
This was as floppies were dying off. It was affordable bulk portable storage before flash drives got cheap.
And yes, many early MP3 players used micro drives similar to this.
I had a 512MB CompactFlash hard drive that I used on an old DSLR, a Fuji Finepix S1 Pro. It was awesome. There wasn't anything available at the time that could compare.
One day the flash drive will fail and whatever is on it will be lost. The data on that HDD can still be recovered if it fails.
The flash drive was purchased with the understanding that it is ephemeral. A new one will replace it in a few years.
The price point for a flash drive this size was unheard of just a few years ago. Micro Center gives away 32GB units regularly as coupon promos.
There's a typo on that opened HDD. It says 2 GB when clearly that size must be at least 2 TB. Stupid bird.
2TB in 2001? It's a Christmas Miracle, Charlie Brown.
![Before flash cards, there were PCMCIA hard drives. [3272x2796 - 1.13MB]](https://pic8.co/sh/cTdorZ.jpg){kind=link}
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