Why were PC Cards originally introduced?
PCMCIA’s 16-bit PC Cards were introduced primarily for the mobile computing environment to provide a small form-factor, low-power alternative to the much larger and power hungry ISA peripheral devices employed in most PCs. Memory card support was defined first, followed by I/O Cards. The PC Card Standard, developed by PCMCIA & JEIDA, provided a universal, non-proprietary expansion capability for notebook platform. • What do the terms PCMCIA, CardBus, R2, and PC Card mean? The original PC Card standard covered Memory Cards first, then I/O card support was added with release 2.x. These cards were defined around a 16-bit architecture that resembles the ISA architecture. Many of the installed base of PC Cards were designed around the release 2.x PC Card standard and therefore many people will refer to the 16-bit PC Cards as PCMCIA, or R2 (Release 2.x) cards. CardBus cards were defined as a new interface to the PC Card standard to address performance and lower power. As PC architecture move
