PCMCIA
We have a mountain of love for PCMCIA cards, and at the same time, a small amount of contempt. Firstly, like the video world's Scart, we consider the name to be ridiculous. But worse than Scart, it's nearly impossible to say PCMCIA at all, without getting all the letters jumbled up and your technological pants tied in a knot, so we generally have to refer to the cards that use the system as 'PC Cards'.
But we'll miss PCMCIA, which is, generally speaking, being replaced with USB peripherals. The problem with USB is that it doesn't have a lovely convenient place to store the device: with a PCMCIA card, you just popped it into the side of your laptop and off you went. That said, the most useful PC Cards were ones that did Wi-Fi and Ethernet access, and that functionality is built-in to most laptops these days.
Interestingly, PCMCIA lives on in digital TV recievers and TV sets, as a way of adding smart card decryption of pay-TV channels to devices sold in most of Europe. Perhaps rumours of its demise are slightly premature.
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