I was fascinated by PCMCIA, because I had a laptop I was trying to put OpenBSD on it in 2001 and its ethernet port was not working, so the card was a workaround. I always wondered why it didn't really take off in Europe, it was a simple and pretty compact way (for the time) to get very advanced stuff in a laptop - I guess it was expensive to produce and the name was atrocious. I believe it got more popular in Japan.