CardBus Products in a CRT iMac?

[FattyMembrane]

I've always known about the airport card slot in the back of my iMac500 and may someday invest in one, but the thought recently came to me that perhaps i could use this as an expansion port for my upgrade-challenged computer. my question is, can this port be used for other CardBus cards, like an airport extreme or firewire800 card? i know very little about the whole mechanism so any information (even a "no you can't stupid, here's why") would be helpful.

 

[NavyIntel007]

Theoretically you should be able to. But I doubt it's possible. I don't understand why Apple won't put a PCMCIA slot on the iMac/eMac line. It's not full expandability, but it's enough and would be useful for things like memory card readers and the like.

 

[vollspacken]

Commodore, the long-gone giant of home computing had a PCMCIA-bus on their Amiga 600/1200 line (1992, those were the glory days)...

for several reasons the thing did not take off (for example the high price for PC-cards and the fact that not many cards were available at that point in time...), and the crappy and incompatible 600 went down.

BUT, today the hardware is available and cheap, so why not put a slot in the all-in-one-lines. mabe even a mini-PCI slot (technically there is one in there: airport extreme), since the bandwidth is wider...

but on the other hand, the emac/iMac has all the ports you could want, but you never know...

vSpacken

 

[FattyMembrane]

well, on a similar note...
i found an 802.11g card that is pcmcia (not a mini-pci like the APE) which is supposed to be compatible with airport. with the correct adapter, this should fit in the slot and work, right? most of the other pcmcia expansion cards have changes to the form factor to allow for things like firewire800 and USB2.0 ports, but this one appears to be of the same factor as a standard airport(b) card.

 

[AnotherMortal]

Not Compatible

The Airport slot in your iMac is the same *form-factor* as PCMCIA but is not a PCMCIA slot. There are several sites that mention this incompatiblity. On the other hand, you *could* buy a USB to PCMCIA adapter or something similar.

I have heard that the pin-out of a CF and an IDE hard drive are nearly identical, but thats a little off-topic.

Here is a link and another link from a PCMCIA sourceforge project regarding Airport/PCMCIA compatibility

You'd probably be best off with some USB-to-whatever adapter.