I attended the swap meet held by the Neon Temple, Tampa Bay’s security guild, where attendees were selling, swapping, or simply giving away old tech gear and books they no longer needed.
That’s where I found and took a photo of the relic above: a PCMCIA card (a name that got shortened to “PC Card”), which used to be a way of adding peripherals to laptops. The card above was for a 56K modem, which means that it was likely used to download Backstreet Boys songs using Napster.
“What did they call those things before they shortened the name to ‘PC Card’?” someone behind me asked.
“PCMCIA,” someone else replied. “Can’t remember what that was short for.”
I have a great memory for trivia, and even I couldn’t remember. I confessed: “I only remember the joke that it was short for ‘People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms’.”