# Paddle Card



## Phishfry (May 28, 2022)

I used this term in helping a user and they had no idea of what a paddle card is.
Do you know?
I loosely consider any ISA/PCI/PCIe converter/adapter card a paddle card.
Usually they are dumb and have little electronics. Just a form-factor converter.
For instance M.2 NGFF NVMe device to PCIe bus adapter card.
A dumb converter card. This term dates way back in my experience. 

I see other references on Google. Do they not teach this in computer curriculum?
Generally a card with little logic but a translator.

I know the old timers are hip to the term. It existed before the ISA bus I suspect.


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## tingo (May 29, 2022)

Many users today know very little (or nothing) about the hardware / inside of the computers, tablets, phones and other electronic gadgets they are using all the time. Luckily for humanity, some young people are interested in how technical things work.


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## sidetone (May 30, 2022)

I've been installing cards on computers since the 90's, maybe late 80's, as a child. I read computer magazines about newer hardware since that time. I'm not familiar with the term paddle card, but I might have heard it once. It was just about a card on the large ISA slots, or maybe on some barely capable external sound synthesizer for games that sounded worse than an AM radio. If I heard the term paddle card in the late 80's or early 90's, the word didn't have significance, and I thought it was a specific type of ISA card.

One thing I miss is daughterboards, which were expansion cards with slots to add more RAM or cards. These are regarded as not needed now.


I think of the Blake Griffin car commercial, where the kids ask him if he's wearing weight lifting gloves, and he says, they're for the car's paddle shifters.


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## SirDice (May 30, 2022)

Phishfry said:


> It existed before the ISA bus I suspect.


That's unlikely. The ISA bus is pretty much synonymous with PC architecture. The first IBM 8088 PC already had an ISA bus. Older systems like the IMSAI 8080 and Altair 8800 used an S-100 bus. 

As an old school nerd, when I read 'paddle' I think of these things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_(game_controller)


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## Phishfry (May 30, 2022)

I might call this a Joystick paddle card





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## robroy (May 31, 2022)

The paddle card term's new to me too, and I started tinkering with computers (as a kid) during the '80s.


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## Phishfry (May 31, 2022)

I can't seem to find an official definition. I was surprised what little showed up in Google for Paddle Card.






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I guess I wrongly assumed it was common computer slang.


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