PCMCIA Cards Hiding in Linksys Routers
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- Опубліковано 27 вер 2024
- I'd always heard early Wi-Fi routers have PCMCIA cards hiding inside... let's open up some old Linksys routers and find out!
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WPC54G v3.1 Drivers: archive.org/de...
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As some eagle-eyed viewers have pointed out, I didn't notice during filming that Windows connected to the internal adapter at the end there, and didn't realize it until after uploading. The wireless-g card does indeed work if you disable the built-in adapter, and the link light blinks as well!
A quick note the first card might actualy work but only in ap mode some older intell cards used to be client only mode so i think thats whats hapenig here :)
@@dankatapich Oh that'd make sense! *cross fingers*
ah that's a good point, I was kinda thinking that but didn't connect the dots that I should actually put it in ap mode to confirm until now haha. i'll try that out.
Came to mention this. Spotted that right away!
@@clabretro I dump the firmware from one and it only allows ap mode and I highly recommend not to flash it to Prisma 2 firmware as it will cause overheat, killing the wlan chip
Anyone remember PCMCIA standing for People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.
Whaaaat???
Yeah, I remember… there were tons of these, my favourite was having „MICROSOFT“ being an acronym for „Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers“ 🤣
Variations I remember:
People Can’t Memorize CONFUSING Industry Acronyms
People Can’t Memorize CRAPPY Industry Acronyms
Yep.
That's the only name I've ever known for that acronym, I assumed it had a proper one but I guess it was never worth finding out... 🤣
Oh man, this brings back bad memories of working for a university. The then president of the university wanted us to be the first campus in the US with the entire campus covered in WiFi. So he rushed to put in a bunch of A/B access points, even though we knew G was right around the corner. So I spent an entire winter break going around to every Cisco AP and swapping out the PC Cards for new G cards.
Good story.
So you could upgrade them! What about a wireless N card?
@@SolarLantern424 yes they could be upgraded, but you couldn't just stick any PCMCIA card in them. They had to be certain cards. I don't know if they made N cards for them, I left before that.
Going to school in that era, I remember 802.11a/b was super early stuff and you'd typically only have one AP in classrooms that needed to use laptops, campus-wide WiFi was still a dream. I remember asking the school IT guy about when we'd get WiFi through the entire school instead of just a couple classrooms and he just laughed at that suggestion. "Too expensive and complicated, we'll never need it everywhere." Well he was wrong, ha. In college, they still only had 802.11g in a few locations outside (almost nobody used it outside), some larger classrooms, and the library. I think it was well into the 2010's before most places had campus-wide WiFi.
I work now for the univeristy i finished my bachelor and masters computer science degree as IT support and teaching asistant. I had to remove all of these old aps and replace theme with Unifiy units, thank god we went POE. Spent this summer just doing so. The worst part is while you are up there replace the projector bulbs and cables so this took 2 months. Shit my pants from height in amphetheaters
Just a little tip for any desoldering with solder wick for anyone who could use it, a little bit of extra flux will go a long way in pulling solder up into the wick
oh interesting! that makes sense, I'll have to try that next time
Actually, extra flux goes ALL the way in pulling solder 😊
I was screaming flux mannnn fluuxxx lol!
I learned that watching some repair videos recently. More flux goes a long way
Good to know! I always wondered why some solder cleaned well with wick and other solder didn't.
It's an obvious solution, but those are often the most difficult to find! 🤣
PCMCIA cards were used quite a bit as a component in wireless devices because you could get the wireless card certified ONCE, and then use it as a drop-in module for whatever device needed WiFi connectivity. IIUC, changes to the design require recertification, so it makes tons of sense to only do this when the RF design actually needs to change, vs. incremental updates on every device that has a radio in it.
It's the same reason many devices now use those little postage stamp PCBs with the drilled castellations along the edge. You just solder that little bugger to your main PCB, and voila, you shortcut the certification needed to sell your device with WiFi, BT, or cellular radios.
The only time it makes sense to integrate the RF design is when 1) you're confident that you'll get the design right the first or second time (no changes and respins and recertifications); 2) you know you're going to make enough of them that the bespoke design certification costs are less than the cost of including larger, slightly more expensive pre-fabbed modules and the interfaces / assembly steps to integrate them. So, an iPhone will be fully integrated. Maybe also later revisions of a mature and essentially perfected router design sold by the truckload to chain computer stores. Everybody else will use a drop-in module.
It goes the other way too - once you've designed a router, but the price/tech aligns to make the next wifi gen affordable, they can reuse the same router chassis, slap a new sticker on the box, drop in the new gen card and suddenly they're selling faster wifi routers with only a couple of firmware tweaks necessary instead of retooling the router line as well as the pcmcia card line.
@@hatbabe Yeah, maybe so. Although, if I had to guess, I suspect there were probably a few changes in the main PCB during the lifespan of that chassis. If nothing else, to upgrade to faster embedded controllers to handle the speed bump between 802.11b and g. But maybe not -- afterall, 802.11a exists as well, and was already capable of the speeds that 802.11g made possible on 2.4GHz. With the price of RAM falling over that timeframe, and the proliferation of wireless clients going up, maybe they got more onboard memory, though.
I never owned the WRT54G, but I did have a Linksys 802.11b AP connected to a 3Com hub, with my one and only wireless client -- a Sony VAIO R505 with a Sony-branded Orinoco PCMCIA card. The AP didn't have switch ports or a router (obviously), so it was in one of the half-height chassis that the WRT ended up using later.
that fcc cert publishes mrre info then some OEM/Mftrs may like so easily obtainable. Seems an expensive test too. This was so old in wireless, remember that router is running a linux kernel and drivers, for an accesspoint OR ad-hoc DEMO(?). 208.11 b was because Apples Jobs shipped the wireless Airport product with an inferior incompatible spec.
@@OurSpaceshipEarth I dunno if that's a fair take. IIRC (and I might be fuzzy on some of the details), it was a request to ... was it Lucent(?) to produce a card for $50, because wireless networking was too expensive to be commercially viable.
I'm not sure how you could arrive at it being "an inferior spec" -- it was 802.11b -- faster than the original 802.11, ratified the same year as 802.11a, and the first time anybody could justify the cost. There were a SEA of products that came and went without much traction. Individual networks here and there, some interesting 900MHz stuff, but nothing de-facto. The card used in the Airport became the most prolific card ever made, with rebadged versions of it in everything from Linksys APs to laptop bundles to industrial devices. It may have been incompatible with everything before it, but it obsoleted a bunch of wireless "standards" that barely anyone had even heard of. 802.11b got cleared by the FCC and equivalent agencies around the world, making it not only ubiquitous in North America, but worldwide.
So I'm left scratching my head here. What was it inferior to? It looks to me like, at least in this case, Jobs did us all a solid.
@@nickwallette6201 You put in a lot more detail, most of which I'd have had to look up to be sure I was getting it right it I made the long answer.
The tl;dr is apple shipped something, and much as the apple haters hate it, when apple ships something, others listen and often others copy. Apple released a faster wifi, instead of waiting for standards track ratification, and everyone's wifi got better soon(er).
5:47 nothing screams „Don‘t you dare and try to service me!“ louder than a soldered case 😤
I think it actually screams, "Please, FCC, can I pass the electromagnetic interference radiation test now?"
Why not both?
@@lcrazy8l It could be. But, given the target market, most people who buy them are barely capable of figuring out which hole to plug The Internet into, much less take the thing apart and try to troubleshoot an embedded system with obscure components that are at most _barely_ technically COTS, and a fully integrated, mostly surface-mount motherboard. ;-)
Given the threat that someone would successfully fix something rather than simply throw it away and buy a new one is basically Johnson noise above 0.0%, I would imagine the justification for cost of enclosing the entire thing in a metal shield is "because we are practically _required to,_ to pass certification."
Bah, at that time somethings were still "built to last" and lots of these are still in service. The only reason to swap it out is exponential speed gains.
@@nickwallette6201 Then why did Linksys develop an open source platform for their WRT routers, just to allow enthusiasts to get under the hood and highly customize the routers and their functionality if they presumed 0.0% of people would be hacking, tinkering and opening them up?
I used to watch TV on my laptop with a PCMCIA TV tuner, back in the day...
I used to watch TV, on a TV, back in the day.
I think I still have an FM Tuner card laying around somewhere. I know I have a few video capture cards that do OTA TV. I once had a Windows Media PC that I watched TV on.
Still got a Dell USB capture card for HD OTA and CATV for Windows Media Center
also a pcHDTV HD-5500 for MythTV on linux...
I had HD OTA on it, and "free" analog Cable tv on a pinnacle card.
I really liked the ads remover and the ability to record any TVshow using keywords in the description in MythTv.
My bro in-law is a local TV host , so I just had his name in my recordings and I was getting all his tv shows, whatever on what channel he was...
I do testing and configuration for PCBA's for a living and I'm 99% sure those tabs on the first board were test points. From the looks of it, they most likely had a test bed that the card would slip into for automated testing.
Oh, as for drivers, the install software is usually optional. Just go into properties for the device, click the update driver button, and point it to the folder containing the drivers. If it's an exe like the first card, try opening it with something like 7-zip. Often, especially back in the old days, these were just executable zip files. If so, extract it to a folder and there should be a sub-folder containing the drivers, just point it to that folder.
I loved just pointing device manager to the drivers folder instead of using the install software, then the hardware worked without the bloat!
There is one network card, or usb? I don't remember, that i got to work by just copy and pasting the one driver file for it into windows driver folder.
This! I did the same back in the day.. No need for the extra software, eventhough Linksyst actually did their best to make it nice.
I can't recall the link light situation though. But if it wouldn't have worked when actually having a link I think I would have remembered.
Those ears on the unmarked PCMCIA card are most likely for extra antennas, or to be able to mount the antennas in a different location. The larger pads are obviously ground planes and the thin trace looks very similar to the trace going to the gold RF connectors.
I used to use pkunzip back in the day on them
100% are not test points
Having a second computer to help diagnose and repair the other one was a game changer
Yup, especially with those ThinkPad laptops. 😂
Just like the OG access point from Apple.
Man, I miss the early/mid 2000s Linksys time period.
Yes those had a 486 and an Orinoco Gold card (the best wifi card brand at the time) if I remember correctly.
It was a Lucent Wavelan, which was eventually rebranded to Orinoco. They were the first to market with 802.11b iirc.
This! I pulled the card out a of one as IIRC it worked natively with pre osx Mac OS(or at least drivers were easily found). At the time most reasonably priced wireless cards did not have Mac drivers…
I was surprised to find an Orinoco card in the original Apple Airport access point at installed an external antenna to boost range. Added bootleg power over Ethernet to power it without the brick on the ceiling.
When most of your IT job was.... waiting for stuff to install/finish.. And while you're waiting, do do more stuff you need to wait for.
Had one of the WRT54G's taking pride of place on my desk when I was a kid. Looked so bold and industrial - if I remember, they were very reasonably priced, think my dad purchased ours from PC World (they used to have stand-alone stores in the UK, but are now part of Currys) for around £70, with the PC Card costing around £40. Remember using it with my dads Compaq Evo N600c laptop in the garden - was mind blowing to be able to use the internet outside, trouble was - in the sun, the laptop display was useless! The Linksys was connected to a 4mb broadband service.
I always preferred D-Link in that era. Their stuff just seemed to last longer and be more capable. Like when they introduced MIMO antennas, which are now standard. They unquestionably had the better coverage during that time period. The only thing I ever used a WRT-54G for was to flash DD-WRT to it and use it as a network bridge to our TV, which lacked wireless.
The plastic boots over the antennas on the newer Linksys routers is actually removable, exposing the same physical metal base on the antennas.
I had to laugh when you mention the game adapter in the documentation and immediately pull one out.
😂
It was a strange choice for Mircosoft to go with the "DVDR and sharpie" aesthetic in the mid-2000s, but that's how I remember getting several of my totally legit Windows releases back in the day, too.
certainly a bold choice by the Microsoft marketing department
I used to work for a place that had MSDN and Technet subscriptions, so pretty much all our software was digital downloads in ISO format. Thus we had binders full of sharpie labeled DVDs for all kinds of MS software; Windows, SQL Server, Exchange, etc.
It's only illegal if the key you got is fake or stolen. You can make copies of the OS software for your own use. But the key has to be legit.
@@chilversc You can still download ISO's of the OS's, in fact that's how most people upgrade to Windows 11.
Seeing old Ubuntu brought back so many memories. I never had a CD burner back then and USB drives were still out of my reach (grew up poor as) and I used to have the install CDs shipped to my house from them for free all the time. They came with stickers and different versions (desktop, server) IIRC. That's not far off form the version of Ubuntu we used to use when I volunteered for a non-profit that donated off-lease and donated computers to needy kids circa 2010ish. I used to hack together the most jank shit and install Ubuntu on it.
I daily Debian on my notebook and for all of my server hosting now, but I still have some love for the Ubuntu project and the push it gave me into Linux waters.
I Used to be a tech guy and swore it off. You have brought me back because of how cool you are.
Those!!! PCI adapters to add PCCARDs inside desktop PCs were also a thing. The early Linux drivers were hell, I still have recurring nightmares trying to get prism or worse, ndiswrapper to work ☠️
ndiswrapper, now that's a supressed memory 💀
I have had 2 different ones of those things. One has an extension to a drive bay dock.
ndiswrapper actually worked pretty well, at least later on.
The kicker is that you were using Windows drivers under Linux.
Oh man, ndiswrapper and wpa_supplicant were the bane of my early 2000s existence. But when I finally got them working with Knoppix, I felt like a complete badass.
It's amusing how common this was. Many years ago I took apart some old generic looking white AP that had two Orinoco Gold PCMCIA Wifi cards with external antennas in it.
I still have a few of them, but silver mostly, except one is gold, but embedded (like the one in this video) which came from a tablet computer
Dude! I can't tell you how excited I am over this video. It's not for no reason, just that I experimented with so much hardware during this era. There was so much more elegance in design. Like yeah, nah it's all the same chipset running everything. THE INTERNET :)
I didn't know some these Linksys products had a PCMCIA card inside of them. Interesting. I own several of the Linksys WRT54G wireless routers and I guess its weird but I never want to toss them out. All of mine still work perfectly, and I recently found one of the 54G routers that was new and still in its shrink wrap. They are terribly slow compared to todays wireless routers, but I use two of them to run several of my RGB led wireless devices with no problems.
They're pretty reliable hardware to be honest and 40 Mbps ~ 5 MB/s.
So it's not too shabby as long as the local environment isn't overcrowded with too many devices or a bunch of wireless/radio interference.
@@jnharton That is the problem. My house has 15 plus wireless devices and I plan on adding a lot more smart stuff. Just thought of 3 more devices, that makes 18 so far. I am sure we could add a bunch more.
It shows how much technology was held back from us to make sure we bought old stockpiles first.
I did love the way these routers, hubs, and switches stacked.
All of those Linksys routers have metal threaded UNDER the plastic. I’ve taken them off before. ;)
Mine too, always lost all the plastic parts
was thinking this
Came here to say that!
Oh man! This brings up so many memories.
A few notes: a) scanning won't work with that old of a firmware. That's normal. b) Prism 1 is super old, and I don't remember ever seeing any of those, but the IDs (0x0156, 0x002) seem to be the same with the later-gen hardware, so perhaps it'll work with newer firmware? (see below) c) There were *multiple* drivers for Prism: hermes/orinoco, hostap, and linux-wlan-ng. I don't think linux-wlan-ng was ever merged, and I think it did not use the (then) standard tooling, iwconfig, but a custom one. orinoco was the default. hostap was the more experimental one, but eventually became by far the most mature one, with its code later on getting promoted to be the kernel's 802.11 subsystem (the very same one we use today!). The drivers may conflict with each other, i.e. you need to "rmmod" one (and all of its sub-modules), to "modprobe" the other one (see below). d) the firmware that you'd typically see in a store-bought PCMCIA card was supporting "infrastructure" and adhoc mode in hardware; Linux implemented AP mode by implementing most parts of 802.11 in software (the HostAP project). I don't remember how these access points implemented it, but It's possible they had special firmware. The hardware actually had multiple slots for firmware (primary, station etc), and there was also a "bootloader" firmware that only allowed for further flashing - it's also possible that's what you have.
The most important point is that you can flash the firmware in RAM, instead of in the non-volatile space, which should allow non-destructive tests. In these old Debian/Ubuntu distros, try installing the package "hostap-utils" (and take note of the maintainer's name ;), run "hostap_diag eth0", and then "prism2_srec --help". The package will also drop a /etc/modprobe.d snippet that blacklists the orinoco driver, so that the hostap driver is able to drive the card instead (needs a reboot). junsun.net/linux/intersil-prism/ has some good notes. junsun.net/linux/intersil-prism/IDtable.html seems to suggest hardware 8002 (which I think is what you have) is supported.
BTW, I'd recommend next time instead of cutting the test pads, to try separating the Thinkpad's motherboard from its case. There were also PCMCIA extenders at the time, well as PCMCIA->PCI cards you could buy, but not sure how easy they are to find these days. But perhaps I'm getting too sentimental with these museum pieces ;)
Technically speaking, it *should* be possible to get the card working under Linux. The OS on the Linksys router is based on Linux too. So there should be kernel drivers somewhere. If you really don't value your life, you could download the Linksys router firmware for the device somewhere, extract the Linux file system from it, see if there is a kernel module for the card somewhere and load it in your Ubuntu install.
oh yeah it's out there somewhere. I'll eventually bite it off I'm sure, but I was about four evenings into this one and decided to call it haha
I doubt they put the driver source in the source code they released. The original router is not x86 so even if we had the source it may not work.
Kernel modules are compiled specifically for a kernel version (or more accurately, a specific kernel) and a CPU architecture, so that's not possible sadly. You'd need the module source, and you'd have to compile a kernel with it added to the tree. And as mstandish above me mentioned, it might not compile at all since it was intended for this specific device and they may have used assembly to improve performance on such a low power CPU or SoC.
EDIT: Spelling
I'm also pretty sure back in the Prism 1 days, the firmware on the card is different for AP mode cards vs client cards. Back then there were 2 chipsets, Hermes (orinoco / apple airport) and everything else was Prism (3com, linksys, cisco, etc etc). I remember doing some very convoluted stuff to trick the firmware into changing to Japan region to use ch 13 and 14, which weren't allowed to be used in north america as they weren't part of the ISM band, which meant there was no interference from other wifi!
@@gorak9000 PRISM1 used just a single firmware image on the PCMCIA card for all of AP, station and ad-hoc peer-to-peer mode. I eventually got AMD to give me the firmware source to figure out the undocumented bits after the original writers of the PRISM1 (and PRISM2) firmware (Neesus Datacom, 2 guys in a basement that consulted for Harris/Intersil) wanted a $100K consulting fee to answer any questions about it.
Ahhhh.... memories of building 12 PCs from installation design options to configuration. I'm buzzing. Gee thanks man, it's kind of joyful being invited along your installation... fascinated me. 🙃 Love the expertise in the commentary. Cheers from Sydney, AU.
That software was way more Win98/2k/pre-SP XP, when there wasn't a good built-in SSID manager yet. I'm amazed it worked at all in Win7.
Thank you for reminding me that Wi-Fi was near unusable before Windows XP service pack 2
Really? I had used WiFi with Windows 95 OSR2 quite successfully@@NotMyProblem711
@@NotMyProblem711 Win XP SP2. Damn how many times to that upgrade wreck a PC for me and I had to do a fresh install?
You are awesome, especially that you remember all of this stuff. Back in the day I was operating at the very top of my envelope trying to get hooked into a community WiFi project, before everybody's printers, phones, microwaves, and TVs had it. Had a laptop in the attic with PCMCIA slot and the card with the beefiest 802.11b output available in US, I think I remember 200mW. It was hooked by very expensive antenna cable to a ~15dBi panel antenna, on the g.f.'s roof. Got a decent connection to a community WiFi server across San Francisco Bay, 10+ miles away! Then ran the Ethernet down through the wall to where the computers (Amiga and a MacMini) were. I was stylin'!! Soon enough the interference got too bad for either that or the boat owners group WiFi that was 3 miles away. Ended up on DSL 😞
Amazing to see how over built the early consumer routers were. Poor Linksys. Like so many other awesome under dogs, taken over and gutted.
Thanks you brought back memories of the good old days
I go way back to windows 3.1 upgrading to 95
The last shot I would have in my tech magic to make that pcmcia card work would be to find a distro old enough that ndiswrapper works (late 4.x kernel tree I think?? - fuzzy recollection) and try both the earliest linksys and prism driver for windows 32 bit driver packages.
Older Slackware was amazeballs with ndiswrapper back in the day.
Knoppix was incredible for this same exact reason. Worked on basically anything.
I don't know why but the way they all stack (just like the switches and print servers as well) is SO satisfying.
WinXP was installing on PATA with no extra actions, but installing it on SATA required disk drivers at the install time.
Yep. You either had to make a build that had the SATA drivers, or add them during setup.
Do you remember the GHOST imaging program that was free before SYSMANTEC bought it?
oh man... so many flashbacks trying to get this era of wifi (PCMCIA and early usb dongles) working in linux. At one point, I remember saying "eff this" and ran a 100ft cable that followed me around the house.
That is a lot of Linksys equipment lol, hmm the "Tower of Power," but for Linksys 😉
Down to earth presentation and experimentation with hardware? Got my sub
USB was no different than PCMICA, when it came to drivers. Many USB devices would tell you to use the install CD first. There were a few reasons for this. The manufacturers knew Windows did not have the device driver or there was a newer driver on the disc that hadnt gone through WHQL certification. If you installed the software on the disc, it came with newer device drivers or it checked the internet for newer software. Of course the disc also contained relevant software to use the device.
They also often came with junk software that the company profited from.
Think you have that backwards. The drivers on included CDs were practically always one of the oldest driver versions you could find, was the driver they had developed at RTM and when they did the run of CDs. Anyone who has done a lot of tech installations will tell you, NOT to use the driver on the CD because it is very old and that instead you should get the latest from the manufacture's website or in some cases not even that, rather the newest from the chipset manufacturer.
I don't miss those days. I still have an old PCMCIA X-Jack card kicking around in my "old PC stuff" box.
Hey, there's a pretty good chance that the 802.11b card will function if you force install the NDIS drivers from the disk in device manager. The Linksys provided installers tend to fail like this a lot. Had a similar problem with a card of the era.
Oh interesting idea, I'll give that a shot
It's not an 802.11b card, the PRISM1 chipset was just 802.11 (1Mbps and 2Mbps carrier rates). Support for 802.11b came in PRISM2.
As I recall, there were adapters made for situations like this. They allowed you to extend the reach of the PCMCIA card's pins to be inserted into the slot itself. It looks like you have a Type 4 PCMCIA card slot. Meaning, you can insert two Type 1 or Type 2 cards in a stacked arrangement. You could also stack a Type 1 with a Type 3 PCMCIA card, use just a single Type 1-4 PCMCIA card in the expansion slot. The Type refers to the thickness of the card, with one being the slimmest. You may still be able to find USB-to-PCMCIA adapters for use with those USB 2 ports.
All these old model numbers that you brought up, brought back a great deal of nostalgia and memories
I remember thinking it was so cool the way those cases were built to stack. I had an old Wireless B router back in the day with a matching WiFi amplifier that stacked together. (yes, they did used to make those)
I really wanted to complete the collection with the matching wired switch. But.. I was still a student, low on cash. Then it all became obsolete so fast!
It's definitely interesting to see what that PC card does inside a computer, but I think it might be even more interesting to figure out what else could be put inside the router and how it could be repurposed. Obviously a lot of those older routers ran Linux and could be hackable, so it might be interesting to make it do something that would actually be currently interesting. Mike, for example, it could be some sort of IOT-type device. It seems to me there's a lot more that could be done with some of these old devices that might still have some practical application today then has really been explored in depth in the hacking community.
I'd be interested to see examples of how devices like that could be put to good use, and the various obstacles involved in doing that.
AFAIK these older 802.11b units don't run Linux, it's the 802.11g ones that do.
You were a trooper on this adventure. You stuck with it longer than most of us before we spent money on a discrete dinosaur card.
Kudos!
Dude! this is so awesome. I loved this video. This brings back memories of when i worked with computer parts trying to get it fixed. Your are correct, when something wasn't working. There was no phone to search the web. We had to figure it ourselves.
I've got a pair of WRT54Gs that I still use -- one covers the dead zone in my bedroom, and I keep one in the travel bag for house calls to friends/family. Damn things are bulletproof!
16:50 These "ears" appear to be alternative solder points for antennas, either for a different side-mount connector or for simply soldering wires directly to instead of the connectors that are actually installed. Since this card at this point would never be used with anything else, they're just a relic of making the card compatible with alternative configurations and can be safely removed.
The only small concern would be something shorting if you touch the cut edge of the PCB with a conductor, assuming there is voltage in those cut traces.
When ORiNOCO was in business, they would do this, installing cards in boxes for commercial use. We would crack open the box, disconnect the patch antenna, hook up a bigger, outdoor antenna, and button it up. We'd take the PCMCIA cards with the modded antenna and an ISA adapter, loading it into desktop computers. We relied on the router at the ISP office to keep the wireless clients isolated from each other. Those times we were not concerned with home networking as extensive as we are now.
I saved a laptop from becoming e-waste, and a PCMCIA wifi card was part of the puzzle. Replaced the harddisk, installed Archlinux, XFCE, and FireFox.
The machine served as a rental unit in a coffee shop business from about 2005 until 2010.
I think they all have metal screw on connectors, but in some models they just have a plastic cover that slides off the "nut" part and allows access if you want to use a wrench.
I remember being able to remember this acronym when I was like 14 and just starting to work on PCs. I was always so confused as to why the acronym for these things was so long and never had a clue what it stood for.
Fun fact. PCMCIA or PC cards as they later got called are just PCI cards that have a controller that allows for Hot swapping. Back when PCMCIA was king of external expansion, USB did not have the reliability or bandwidth to support high speed devices such as Network cards, Wireless adapters or sound cards (yes there were PCMCIA sound cards).
PCMCIA was superseded by Expresscard which by its name, you can tell uses the PCI Express protocol and allows for hot swapping just like PCMCIA.
I used to collect PCMCIA cards like other kids had baseball or garbage pal kids cards. I had dialup modem cards that were so delicate when you plugged in the phone line. I remember going from win 3.11 to 95 ! ( i was 14). Around the same time i scored an external 9600 baud modem (cya later 2400 ! ).
Im glad your channel popped up for me this morning. Thank you
I bought a linksys WRT54GL back in the day as my first wireless router! It looks basically the same as the models you have in the video. But the hardware is newer, and it supported Open-Source firmware (that's where the letter L stands for in the model name). I immediately flashed DD-WRT on it as soon I received it. I still use it to this day! Although not anymore as my main router, now it's a wireless bridge to a non wifi IP-cam in my garden. The thing is solid like a brick!
2nd that, they ARE rock solid and the only thing that reboots them now are POWER OUTAGES!
i worked at radioshack as my first job and had a kid come in a buy a linksys router he wanted to turn into a bridge. i wonder if he got it to work, that was way back in 2006.
When you were talking about the Orinocco and Prism drivers that brought back memories and then you showed the Linksys CF card I had at the time. I bought the CF card so I could use it with a Sharp Zaurus PDA but I could also use it my laptop as well. I definitely don't miss the days of early wifi....so much easier now
"i dont want to deal with that today", bro i felt that in my soul, specially when troubleshotting hardware
I mean, doubling down from win7 to XP... fair play. But the Kingston USB flash drive you have at 19:30 ... now thats a relic. Always was on my keychain with a lot of ''good things'' on it. You have earned your like Sir, thanks for the trip down the memory lane
A lot of early 2000s installer UIs were unique, creative, and very cool looking. We've regressed in a lot ways... lmao
wow! talk about going to memory lane for me....I started tinkering with and building machines in the mid 90's....probably around 95 or so and used to frequent those computer shops like what your Dad had (shown in the previous video of yours I just watched) .... but I would do these kind of things all night and day getting things to work...haha very cool! and since then, I have never bought an off the shelf pc ready to roll....I have built every one to this day.....love this stuff! thanks for this, so cool!
Note that USB isn't what makes this stuff plug-n-play drivers easy. Windows is what makes it that, by having super amounts of bloat and all the drivers for all the devices readily available for all the popular devices... Granted, some portions of USB, like the HID spec made a lot of drivers generic, but not for more sophisticated devices like these.
I still have my original wcp54g drivers for that wireless G PCMCIA card archived. I have two of the cards somewhere. Last I knew, they still worked, just didn't need them anymore after the last laptops I owned with PCMCIA slots stopped working. I was super familiar with getting them running in Linux that was contemporary for that era. Really neat watching you try it.
Installing Windows from Floppy Disks was even more therapeutic because you had to constantly swap disks.
I do remember the 20 or so floppies for 3.1 and then 3.11 (Networking)
I'll never get back those hours and days
It only took one (This disk is not formatted) error for you to become a head banger ,especially if it was THE LAST DISC
I used a lot of these pcmcia cards back in the day, as I used a lot of laptops from the mid-90s to the early 2000s. It was the only way to upgrade the functionality of most laptops at the time. They made network cards, sound cards, TV Tuner cards, modems. All kinds of weird stuff. Thanks for reminding me why USB is so much better.
Great editing! You turned a long video into a wonderful tech drama.
PCMCIA had some cool options back in the day, but USB won over that tech for many reasons. It had it's peak in the Win95/98 era of laptops. USB began to take off after Win98SE, but had a hard time supporting flash drives in that OS.
Drivers in those older OS's was always the fun part since it wasn't as plug-n-play as it it today, be happy you don't need to manually set IRQ's anymore. I think the only PCMCIA card I have left is an Adaptec SCSI adapter.
The unhappy router at 22:38... Amperage or voltage isn't enough on the adapter... Oh I saw later you figured that out hehe.
If you can find any of the Linksys routers with the “L” version like the WRT54-GL were built with Linux support for making your own firewall using open wall or something else like that so divers exist for the cards in the early ones.
how this got recommended to me I do not know, however this dude is who I want to be around after an emp apocalypse.
I worked for the RR and used a T-60 to program control systems in RCI locomotives and used a Linksys card to conned to the access point at the yard. That T-60 was tough as nails...
The first APs I ever deployed were the Enterasys Roamabout that used PCMCIA cards as the radios. There was even a mezzanine expansion unit to allow you to slot a second card.
I used to run a service department back in the early 2000's and I can confirm that PCMCIA cards were a complete nightmare. We actually had SEVERAL cards that wouldn't install with the provided drivers and actually has to track down what the card really was and that was BRAND NEW right out of the box!!! Completely insane and those damn cards were used for almost ANYTHING and EVERYTHING on the early laptops. USB ports were there and next to nothing actually used them for anything. The earliest use for USB was a mouse and that gradually grew into printers, USB implementation was SLOW!!!
Linksys probably made it so they couldn't be used outside of the router, manufactures have been trying that for years.
Cisco bought Linksys while I was working the refurbish troubleshooting department.
Our warehouse filled up quick. We just ended the Sun server line. I had thousands of these things piled near my desk.
I'm a pro at disassembly. I love those shields. My desk looked like an 80s frat house fro. how high I stacked that thin metal.
PCMCIA? Wow....I remember in the 90s we said it stood for "PC makers create insane acronyms". 😊
I’ve a load of these routers, true story.
DDWRT !!! What an era
Love the nostalgia. I still remember my first PC, a Columbia Data Products MPC-1600 complete with 128k of ram, two 5.25" floppy drives, a 16-color graphics card, and an Intel 8088 processor running at 4.77 mHz. I hot-rodded the thing with a 30-meg hard drive, back filled the ram to 512K (for about $1,000) and installed an 8087 math coprocessor. If I remember, we were at DOS 3.2 at that time. Memories...
If you wanted fun
You need to start with a Tandy Radio Shack CoCo (color computer) on a 12 inch B&W TV on ch3 and then try to write programs in basic to be stored on
A DAMNED CASSETTE RECORDER that never worked
This is where head banging began
My first wireless card as an A/B pcmcia that came out of a yard sale router 20 years ago. I remember struggling to find drivers for it (XP) but eventually I found it. I taped the antennas from the router to the side of the laptop lid. A few years later I scored a free G router that had a mini PCI network card inside, and I put that in my laptop.
i had to replace my WRT-54G last year. i really enjoy tech that waves the finger at planned obsolescence.
I have no clue how I found this video, but I'm so glad I did.
I loved my old wrt54g when I was a kid. I remember getting annoyed by its limitations when I was a young teenager and found out how to flash ddwrt to the family router to keep it more stable and do other tweaks to it. We used to have issues with it crapping out and only a power cycle would bring it back. seemed to be related to the number of connections it could handle and torrenting would easily clog it up. ddwrt allowed more connections without hanging up so the connection wouldn't crap out anymore.
Japan's NTT, an ISP, up until pretty recently, still used an optional PCMCIA card in their fiber gateways to provide WiFi. The idea was that you could buy a WiFi card for the gateway to utilize just a single device for all of your Internet needs without the need for providing a second device for a wireless router. Thought it was really interesting. When WiFi 6 came out, all you had to do was just buy a new card and swap it out in the gateway without having to replace the whole device.
As a fellow computer crap hoarder I occasionally struggle with the temptation to get it all working again.
Unfortunately I had to move house a while ago so a vast amount of my hoard went to the recycling centre.
Some of it was brand new in box pcmcia cards I had picked up at auction just because I wanted something else in the lot.
00:08 "it's more likely than you think!" lol - some hardcore Fark flashbacks here. Thanks for this!
edit: 05:45 the desoldering wick works a lot better if you apply a touch of flux first.
Ahh, centipedes... The Internet used to be a wonderful place 😂
Nice to see a Sun Fire V440 🙂
I used to own one as well, which was maxed out by cobbling together the internals of another V440. Too bad it was too noisy and to powerhungry to be of any use to me, other than turning it on remotely and play around with it. You definitely do not want to be in the same room with it when it's on ;-).
Back in the early 2000s, one of my clients was a dentist who was an early digital X-Ray adopter. The x-ray sensor he owned ($8k+ each!) were PCMCIA (they're all USB now). He originally used a laptop he carried around to each room, but he wanted a desktop PC and a big (well, big at the time), 23" monitor in each of his 5 operatories. I had to find a manufacturer that made a PCI card with a hot swappable PCMCIA slot for each PC, so they could just plug the X-ray sensor into whichever room's PC they needed it.
This brought back so, so, so, so many memories. Thank you.
I've done this before. I had opened up either a Linksys or Belkin Wireless router without antennas and sure enough there was a retail PCMCIA card in it. It worked perfect in my laptop without issue.
"Another obstacle is just, you know, my will to live."
Truer words.
nice seeing someone still playing around with pcmcia cards and win7/xp
i still got some of these kinda cool cards myself, just for memorability
Ah, the 54G and DD-WRT, now you had a router! Miss those days.
Looking back at windows 7, it's amazing how much of that core UI is STILL in 10. 11 changed a lot of it.
regarding the power issues, I've had problems with device stability and found some of the electrolytic capacitors went bad. Who knew :/ - I've had to replace that capacitor right next to the power plug on many devices. On my devices those are usually for ripple, and when they stop being capacitors they can cause issues. Cheap to replace and has helped me in the past. hope it helps you too
Reminds me of years of Smoothwall on a 166MHz MMX Pentium and DDWRT on a 54G. I never knew some had PCMCIA cards!
Those old 54G's with custom firmware were awesome!
I think your “Linksys collection” is far stranger than my earwax doll collection.
Early routers used PCMCIA cards internally because they already had FCC testing compliance. If a manufacture changes the design of the radio part of a WiFi or blue tooth radio, the manufacture must re-certify the entire card or system. This is why even today laptops still use a drop in WiFi/blue tooth module. No change to the module means that the FCC certification flows through to the laptop.
It is also one of the benefits of the ESP32 modules. Two versions, one with a built in and one with an external plug in antenna. Both have FCC certification that flows through to any development board, device or product that uses the module.
This kind of thing is what I spent my evenings and whole weekends dicking around with back in the day. As I write this, I'm simply using a Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra as my daily driver. But ~20yrs ago, I had a laptop like one of these. Laptop disassembly was still pretty cutting edge. But i loved getting different upgrades to work.
OMG , the charger SPEED MONDS , The losing of screws , the looking for a replacement on the screw bin .... are you like my long lost twin brother ? you gain a sub
😂
13:30 - For me, installing windows back then was always a mixture of excitement and nervousness. PCs from that era were a lot more finicky during setup and the odds were high you'd run into some kind of roadblock you'd have to figure a way around. However, nothing beats the satisfaction of hearing that Windows 7 startup chime after hours of troubleshooting.
agreed!
I remember having a PCMCIA WIFI card around 2002 when I was studying. Great times.
We also had a super fast (for the times) 100 mbit wired internet at the university.
Early in my career, we set up Dell access points and they have PCMCIA cards inside of them too. I thought it was crazy back then.
This brought back a lot of memories. I started as a computer tech in 1987, so I went through quite a lot of changes in the industry. I never got much into Linux though. I mostly worked on DOS then different versions of Windows. A one point I even worked on an old machine (not a regular PC) that was running Windows 1.0. I worked on a few Apple PCs, but I did not even do that very much.