Elfen said:

In the Old '486 days, the older '486 PCMCIA Slots were 8bit while Pentiums introduced the 16bit PCMCIAs. And in those days, though you could not get a 16bit card into an 8bit slot, you can get an 8bit card into a 16bit slot and but it will run in 8bit mode. I thought it was this mode you were speaking of. My old '486 Toshibas keep reminding me of this as the many 16 but cards I own does not fit into their slots.

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Say what?

PCMCIA was designed from day one as 16 bit, although the standard does accommodate falling back to 8-bit mode when used on lightweight hosts. (For instance, an 8088-based machine like a Poquet PC or HP Palmtop.  Something tells me you're confusing the difference between "standard" PCMCIA (which, again, is 16 bit with semi-optional 8-bit fallback, implemented by a signal line on the bus and otherwise basically a superset of ISA) and "32 bit CardBus", which is technically a completely different bus (a flavor of PCI) implemented on a backwards-compatible connector as being "8bit vs. 16bit". The keying on CardBus cards *is* different to prevent them from being plugged into a machine equipped with a "standard" PCMCIA controller and, yes, most 486 laptops don't support CardBus while most Pentium laptops do.

(To support CardBus the system's chipset has to support PCI, which is why CardBus cards likewise don't work on any Mac laptop prior to the 3400. Very few 486 laptops were PCI based, most used some combination of ISA and VESA Local Bus for their internal peripherals.)

Easy way to tell if you're looking at a CardBus card: almost *all* of them have gold-colored metal plates on top of the bus connector. For plain PCMCIA those plates are either plain metal or absent entirely.