PCMCIA Cards Hiding in Linksys Routers
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- Опубликовано: 25 апр 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/details/wpc-54-gv...
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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... 🤣
For those not familiar with PCMCIA, PC Card and CardBus, the bus that's used for the original PC card is essentially an extension of the 16-bit ISA bus. CardBus upgrades that to basically be a 32-bit PCI bus and those cards have the golden strip with rivets near the connector end. ExpressCard succeeded PC Card and CardBus by switching over to PCI Express (also supports USB).
Some "modern" PC Card sockets in laptops aren't even compatible to PCMCIA. Also, most Cardbus cards do not work in PCMCIA slots. While the slots are somewhat mechanically compatible, it does not mean the cards work. BAck in the day, when this tech was still very common, it caused much frustration with customers and professionals. Most of it because people mixed up the terms PCMCIA, Cardbus and PC Card, just because they look similar, but actually aren't at all.
@@blubbspinat9363 Even more fun is that CableCARDs also use the PC Card form factor, but don't use the standard PCMCIA or CardBus protocol. Cisco also uses the PC Card/CardBus connector for interface cards. If I remember correctly, the connector is oriented upside down compared to traditional cards.
Also, the Compact Flash card briefly shown is also the same bus, just with a smaller connector.
@@questionlp I still own a Sharp personal assistant ZR-5000, that, believe it or not, has a slot in this form factor. I have yet to find a card that works with this. According to the manual, there are modems and memory cards that are supposed to work, if i ever found one. The unit itself is still going strong.
@@blubbspinat9363 Nice! I'm wondering if it's down to the limited drivers that were bundled with the Linux kernel or flags/masks that Sharp added to the kernel to limit cards for any given reason. I was strongly in the FreeBSD/NetBSD camp when it came out and was trying to keep track of people trying to get NetBSD or OpenBSD running on those. It was the same time that I was jonesing for an HP 200LX to do the same.
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.
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! 🤣
12:18 The screw for the hard drive cover is right next to that long black one.
oh my god... that's hilarious. that's 100% the screw, I just tried it. I ignored it because I thought it was too long 😂
@@clabretro I saw it right away. I own a lot of Thinkpads. 😏
Indeed, ive seen it too. I have like whole bag of thinkpad screws left from few T400 ive had and repaired long time ago.
@@clabretro You forget how THICC an laptop is to even think that screw is too long!
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...
Having a second computer to help diagnose and repair the other one was a game changer
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
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.
The plastic boots over the antennas on the newer Linksys routers is actually removable, exposing the same physical metal base on the antennas.
I still have that exact Linksys 2.4GHz G wifi card laying around somewhere. It was my main tool for doing packet captures on unsecured networks in college. Fun times.
Me too. I actually still have two of the USB versions as well. They were both AWFUL.
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 ;)
I had to laugh when you mention the game adapter in the documentation and immediately pull one out.
😂
I miss these routers. So reliable, so versitile! I used to pick them up at thrift shops and use them all over to help friends and family fix their internet problems.
They were EVERYWHERE like those Dells. You know the dell
still have a small collection of them here too, also acquired the later models from junk stores. I was stoked when i found the 2 linux based models with bigger flash and whatever to make them more useful with aftermarket firmware. now they all sit in a closet. collecting dust.
@@littlegoobieCan you run doom on them!?
DD-WRT
I think I still have a few linksys routers out in my shed in my back yard, unless I threw them away a few years ago when I cleaned a few things up. I know I still have some old fans, and cpu heatsinks I should toss, because I will never again use them. I also have lots of ethernet cables, VGA cables, etc. around.
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!
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 :)
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).
Was watching some unrelated videos and then found this recommended to me. I don't know if I'm the only one fascinated by wireless routers, but seeing a bunch of them on the thumbnail, instantly click on and watch it.
It's interesting, right?(:
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
OMGosh. i had I.T. flashbacks. *beats head against desk* i feel better now.
For sure. I have been out of IT since around 2010, but I still remember a lot of these devices.
When my Dad was with IBM as a distributed systems engineer I acquired soooo many of these and other server parts. He was constantly bringing home either brand new stuff or high tier hardware that was being replaced with brand new stuff. Needless to say when I finally got into IT and computers, I had a field day when I learned what it all did. lol
This largely comes down to the complexities of the FCC approval process - there is a distinction between devices that intentionally transmit (like a WiFi card) and devices that just incidentally generate RF noise. There is also the issue that in principle the FCC require system-level testing - which is a bit of a problem when you have a transmitter on a user-replaceable plug-in card. The approach that the FCC took was called "modular approval" - you had to test the plug-in bit for detailed compliance with the FCC rules, but then didn't have to repeat that testing on the system level and could just test for the elements of Part 15 compliance that concerned incidental interference. If you were making a bunch of products using the same board, the savings on reduced testing could cover the extra hardware costs over the anticipated production run. This became less attractive as the expected production runs got larger and the NREs (like compliance testing) could be spread over more production units.
very interesting, and that makes sense that they wouldn't want to repeat testing for additional components
I think that's most of the reason many smaller manufacturers who don't make million unit quantities get say ESP microcontrollers on daughterboards today, don't want to deal with wireless approval. Also don't want to pay for the tuning but that's not so bad.
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.
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 😞
All these old model numbers that you brought up, brought back a great deal of nostalgia and memories
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.
20:09 btw I wouldn’t recommend operating any radio transmitter without the antennae attached. I don‘t know if it is as problematic for modern low-power devices but I remember you can actually grill your transmitter stage by powering it on without an antenna or at least a dummy load. But I guess for the power used in a WiFi card that might actually be overly cautious
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?
I did love the way these routers, hubs, and switches stacked.
Man, that was a nice trip down memory lane, thank you for that. Linksys routers modded with DD-WRT, Windows XP and Ubuntu in coffee colors, getting traumatized by fighting with wireless drivers. Those were the days 😀
If you ere a customer of AT&T Home Internet, you may have purchased or leased a 2Wire modem. They also sold a Wireless-b external box. In the earlier versions, they did the same thing as Linksys and put a B card inside the box to make things cheaper. The cards were Oronico (sp?) cards :D
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?
"Another obstacle is just, you know, my will to live."
Truer words.
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.
That T60 is such a cool machine. All the blinkinlights and a fantastic keyboard.
Still got mine, Ubuntu 16.0 used as a TV tuner on RUclips to a Big Screen with VGA
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 remember seeing one of these cards inside my router forever ago and thinking how I wanted to try the same thing! It's super satisfying seeing someone finally try it!
Love the tear down and thanks for the explanation as you moved through each step!
I had one of these cards and it almost never worked when I needed it. There was a song and dance of rebooting, taking the card out and reseating it.
13:20 Absolutely felt ya. Especially with the "one family laptop" only things, and literally no other devices. I remember going crazy when we got our first second laptop of the family cuz the older one had issues and was finally slowing down, then I started my journey of installing the OS on own and was like "nooo way! I got it actually done, so cool, so smart!" XD
This brought back so, so, so, so many memories. Thank you.
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!
As for the falling out of those feet, the material does indeed shrink but they also lose their elasticity, which caused by a property of the material that also lends it the grippy sticky surface. So as it loses that property, it shrinks and loses elasticity and grip, no longer sticking to the inside of the hole.
I've made replacements for these before with a 3D printer, making the grid on the bottom by sticking some chicken wire to the print bed that was thin enough to pass under the nozzle.
I've got a Netgear Router with a cable modem integrated, something an ISP like comcast would give you. I cracked it open and there was a mini PCI-E Wifi card inside. Didn't know linksys was doing it since the beginning!
This brought me back to high school when I was really getting into networking and I had laptops that didn't have any wireless networking and using these cards to get them online. I might have to dig through my boxes of junk in the attic to see if I still have a couple of these Linksys PC cards!
slight correction on 9:45, some thinkpad T61 did come with the IBM branding, from my understanding it was only for business customers who had a long history with IBM involving many contracts and such that were slow to transfer over. likewise, some thinkpad T60 came with lenovo branding though this was much less common. the last thinkpads truely produced by IBM were the T43 and T43p
interesting!
I still have an IBM ThinkPad R50e, and it has one of the coolest retro-futurist features -- a single amber LED in the screen bezel, pointed straight down at the keyboard, which turns on and off with a firmware-defined hotkey. I have Debian installed on it, and it runs like a champ!
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.
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.
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!
Thanks brings back memories as i look at a couple old laptops on a shelf.
YES!! It's Friday night, which for the nerds like me means, it's clabretro time.
That is a lot of Linksys equipment lol, hmm the "Tower of Power," but for Linksys 😉
wow, this brings me back. I Worked on so many of those t60s back in the day
Great video, brings back many a ton of great memories of trying to figure out wireless back in the early days. This was the experience trying to get WiFi working back then, as well.
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.
I remember I always wanted a pcmcia card slot for my PC.
Yes! and I really wanted it during all this haha
I had (and probably still have in some box in the garage) ISA cards that gave you 2 PCMCIA slots in a desktop - specifically to use wireless cards in Linux! PCMCIA is basically just ISA protocol in a different connector, but there's always a bridge chip - it's never a "dumb" connector changer type adapter
Microsoft pressured OEMs to stop exposing DMA capable buses when someone demoed authentication bypass through IEEE1394. In theory a USB drive type of device could be made to just write to main RAM to make Windows screen lock magically exit with success, and they didn't like it. Apple kept doing Thunderbolt though.
Yeah, especially on the front
I still have the PCMCIA card from my 1999 Dell laptop. It cost me many hundreds of dollars and magically made my laptop a 56K modem and fax. I was so pleased with it, and it is so robust as well made I can't bear to recycle it. I guess this is why we tech nerds all have our mini museums.
Nowadays Staples will give you $5 for the most outdated tech junk you have absolutely no chance of ever installing again.Recently they've changed from sending you a coupon in your e-mail to cash in for whatever item is NOT specified in the microprint
(you know you can buy TP !)
to building a file with your ID to accumulate points
I'll never run out of junk from my museum
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.
Oh man, some throw backs here. I used to sell those WRT54 routers and wireless G PCMCIA cards at Best Buy during college. Also my first job after college, we were still using those ThinkPad T60s. They were super easy to take apart and swap parts.
my first job was at radioshack, and i remember selling a linksys router to a kid who wanted to make it a bridge or receiver so he didnt have to run an ethernet cable across the house. i wonder if he got it to work.
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.
The person who designed the linksys router box/mold deserves an award. 👍
Wrt54g was Nokia 3310 of routers
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.
i had to replace my WRT-54G last year. i really enjoy tech that waves the finger at planned obsolescence.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
Ohh this takes me back! The first laptop I ever owned was the same model! ❤ I still have a soft spot for ThinkPad!
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.
We always called PCMCIA “picky-micky” cards. I couldn’t even estimate how many Linksys WRT54’s & derivatives I’ve used & worked on. I still have a new one in box sitting around. Ah memories 😊
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...
Thanks for a interesting video ! Brings back some old memories.
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 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.
T60, that thing was great!
I‘ve seen such issues with more current Rockchip based SBCs when I got the overlay wrong or when I burned out the IO on another trying to save it via uart0.
I have kept my WRT54, thrown the Ubiquity out as I haven’t been too happy with them (I expect DD-WRT, no ☁️, no extra apps..).
Another very enjoyable ~ half hour, thank you very much!
Down to earth presentation and experimentation with hardware? Got my sub
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.
This brought back so many memories 🎉
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.
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.
Those "plastic connectors" are just plastic boots over the regular metal connectors from what I remember. I still have a bunch of WAP-11's and 54G's in a box in the garage - pretty sure the WAP-11's are all PC cards, and the WRT54g they had already integrated everything onto one PCB
i remember being given a faulty router to recap in the early 2000's and finding a pcmcia card in it! probably still have it up in the loft somewhere, it seemed like a great way of them just re using their existing tech, i bet thats why those first routers were so reliable
Reminds me of years of Smoothwall on a 166MHz MMX Pentium and DDWRT on a 54G. I never knew some had PCMCIA cards!
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.
The T60 was such a fantastic laptop. I got one issued from work in 2011 until I quickly got upgraded to a T61. Mine was running XP and then got upgraded to Win7 around 2012
I worked so many years with one PCMCIA with early 2G connection to make maintenance nightshifts..... fun work days...
Same here,,, i still work at night :- (
Im in a maintenance window with Ericsson right Now!
i had that same series laptop. had a T62P and loved it. i would love to get another one
I love your insights! Work with Cisco hardware all the day
I currently use PCMCIA cards in my TiVo Bolts purchased about 7 years ago. They serve as “cablecards” for Xfinity Comcast.
Neat, Thanks for the Nostalgia trip!!
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!
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 ;-).
I had that Linksys CF wireless G card with my Sharp Zaurus SL5500 PDA back in the day. It worked great back in 2002.