Very cool project. Would love to seem more projects that use PicoW, 02W to bring 20th century HW into the 21st. And I love BIOS font theme!

PCMCIA has always been my favorite form factor.

One of my favorite deployments of it was to make a router out of a laptop - and use two of the xircom realport "mating" cards to give the laptop two real rj45 ports without any dongles:

https://www.premisesnetworks.com/doc/pc-card-0008

... combine that with an already existing rj45 on the laptop and you had a three-port gateway with a built-in KVM and a built-in UPS.

how would such a GPIO <-> PCMCIA interface work? the author said the CPLD handles the voltage conversion and “address decoding”, but what I don’t understand is how does the data end up on the Pi?

I love the ridiculousness of this.

What's faster? The dual-core Cortex M0+ at 133MHz in his "wifi card"? Or the Intel 80486SX at 33MHz in his laptop?

It bums me out that computers, generally, are becoming more obfuscated and locked down by default, but I begrudgingly admit that there are non-trivial benefits for many users, such as security and interface consistency. These cheap, hackable-by-design little machines gaining momentum as counterpoint really warms my heart.

Those PCMCIA linksys cards were amazing back in the day, especially since they did come with windows 98 drivers. You literally could grab any old laptop and make it into what a pi is today.

They even had CF/PCMICA wifi cards for PDA's and such. While this thread/topic isn't about that or such, I rushed to recall netsumbler and wardriving.

Love the ThinkPad 235 — I have one too :)

It's a Ricoh Chandra in disguise! https://aichi.to/~thinkpad/tp235/index.html

This is really cool! Also, I wonder if the author would share the CSS for the 80x25 VGA white on blue style text? Seems pretty much totally accurate!