[majormajor]

Yeah, this used to be pretty common.

Through the 90s laptops came with expansion cards and often swappable bays. Even late-90s Mac laptops had two bays that you could swap batteries, DVD/CD/floppy drives into and out of, plus a PC Card slot that could take things like TV video capture cards or Wifi adapters.

I don't remember if PCMCIA slots had enough bandwidth to make external video cards practical (plus... it would require a separate monitor, I guess), though.

They all went away in the quest for lightweight size and capacity... especially as more things got built in.

[znpy]

> I don't remember if PCMCIA slots had enough bandwidth to make external video cards practical (plus... it would require a separate monitor, I guess), though.

PCMCIA surely not, but express card most likely.

I remember some mods installing an external GPU onto the mythical ThinkPad X220 by means of a bridge card that would fit in the express card slot and would allow a full pci-express to be connected. See: https://artemis.sh/2021/08/04/eGPU-on-thinkpad-x220.html

[toast0]

> I don't remember if PCMCIA slots had enough bandwidth to make external video cards practical (plus... it would require a separate monitor, I guess), though.

Original PCMCIA was 16-bit ISA (not sure the speed), CardBus was 32-bit, 33Mhz PCI with DMA and whatnot. Certainly there were many video cards on 16-bit ISA, but I wouldn't think you'd want to stuff one into a PCMCIA slot, maybe a hercules card so you could do monochrome/color multi-monitor; but multimonitor didn't really come into popularity until windows 98 and 2000 on the NT side; advanced graphics card back then were AGP, but some were released as 32-bit PCI as well; they almost certainly wouldn't have been able to be compacted to fit in the slot, but you could probably have a cardbus -> pci slot adapter and some ugly thing. A quick search doesn't find any, but I'd expect something to exist as a development tool.

[acomjean]

PCMCIA

I remember those slightly larger than a credit card (and thicker).

I had 2, and IBM one which had a eithernet and modem on it (and a really fun sparkly label). and a scsi one for a zip drive (they had parallel port zip drives... but)

[dabluecaboose]

I had one I got at the Spy Museum in DC that was a little compartment! In high school I used to keep a $20 bill in there in case I wanted to do something with my friends that cost money