Board or card?

Do you design boards as in "printed circuit board" or cards as in "add-on card"? English not being my mother tongue I wondered what the difference is, if any.

Thanks, Jenalee K

Reply to
Jenalee K.
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Usually cards plug into boards, as in "mother board" or "daughter card". A standalone may be called a board or card, depending on where one is from and who one works for.

--
  Keith
Reply to
Keith

They're pretty much interchangeable, depending on where the speaker went to school, the phase of the moon, the current price of tea in China, and so on. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

"printed circuit board" means any board with a circuit printed/etched on it. It normally refers to the board itself, not including any components that might be soldered to it.

"add-on card" is a specific application of printed circuit boards, where one board can be added (i.e. plugged in or on) some other board to increase functionality.

Reply to
DJ Delorie

People in the USA who design electronics usually say "pc board" or "PCB" or just "board". A PCB without parts is a "bare board."

"Card" is more of a popular expression, but I might say "video card" even though I design boards! I guess that if I design it, it's a board, but if I buy it, it might be a board or a card. Silly.

To make things worse, we refer to the things we design as "boards" but they plug into "card cages" or "crates." I've never heard the expression "board cage."

Nobody ever accused English of making sense.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Perhaps "card" was orig6a: a flat stiff usually small and rectangular piece of material...bearing electronic circuit components for insertion into a larger electronic device (as a computer).

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

English almost always makes sense, when you know enough linguistics to be able to sort out the history of a particular word or phrase. By way of example, English words are spelled according to one out of just six sets of phoneme to grapheme translation rules, so all you need to know to spell an English word correctly is its historical origin ...

This isn't all that helpful to most native speakers, let alone people learning English as a second language, but it remains true that English actually does make sense.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Reply to
bill.sloman

The term module could also be used. DEC used the term module for cards put into the sockets of their computers way back in the 60's.

greg

Reply to
zekor

Some places use PWB (Printed Wiring Board) and PCA (Printed Circuit Assembly) to remove ambiguity between designations for bare and populated variants

--avoiding the PCB moniker completely.

Reply to
JeffM

The comedian Rex Navarette did a routine on ESL Class ("English is a Stupid Language")... if you have more than one mouse, they are "mice". If there is more than one house, it's not "hice", it's a NEIGHBORHOOD.

Reply to
mrdarrett

They are all boards. If they are supplied individually to be inserted into another piece of equipment (e.g., a computer), they are cards.

Reply to
mc

It's not so much that it doesn't make sense, as that it's confusing, because we have at least two words for almost everything, and usually more than that - check a thesaurus some time. :-)

But that also means it's the richest, and most expressive, and if I may say so, the most powerful language on the planet, presumably because of its diverse origins.

If the telephone had been invented by a German, it'd be the fernsprecher. ;-) [thanks to The Good Doctor, may he rest in peace.]

Cheers! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

I've found that many people believe their mother tongue is the richest, but that in fact this merely shows that they know little of other languages.

Of the three languages I know well, each is every bit as expressive as any of the others, although usually not in quite the same way. This makes that, even though using each language may be easy enough, translation from one into another is still hard work.

Jeroen Belleman

Reply to
Jeroen Belleman

If the three are English, German and Dutch, keep in mind that Dutch and German split off from English around 800AD, and Dutch and German really didn't become separate languages until around 1500AD, when Martin Luther started writing theology in German.

language. Chinese and Japanese would be better examples, but even there the only thing that is really difficult is the Japanese system of honorifics - you have to know where you are on the 32-levels in their pecking order, and where to put your audience in that range , but the real problem is in understanding how their society works, not the language itself.

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Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Reply to
bill.sloman

I wonder if language reflects the attributes of a society, or affects their way of doing things. The American version of English seems to be rather loose in its rules and diverse in its origins (and becoming more so, in popular usage), much as the society itself. People who speak and write with more rigidly defined languages perhaps are themselves also less "creative" in the sense of "breaking the rules". I am not putting any value judgment on this, as both ways of doing things have pros and cons. Moreover, those who abuse a language from ignorance or apathy are likely to be less constructively creative, and those who care enough to follow such rules as there are will probably have the discipline and intelligence to accomplish great things.

My point is that possibly some aspects of a language may affect those who have grown up with it, while the general characteristics of a society may affect the evolution of their language.

Paul

Reply to
Paul E. Schoen

And both the details of a language and the rigidity of that language affect how the user thinks.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

There is something of a hierarchy in definitions for many english words or classification systems, that may, or may not, be uniformly used by all speakers. In this case, a PCB is a broad class which includes the subset of "add-on card" (probably better phrased as "add-in card") of PCB's which are in some way or another, added to a larger system (either inserted in a motherboard or backplane/card cage).

Think in terms of animal, and the many different subclassifications of animals.

Reply to
fpga_toys

I'd "think" that that would depend on whether you "think" in words, linearly, or "think" in greater contexts, with greater concepts, and only translate them into words when you need to express them to someone else. ;-) (who speaks the same language, of course. %-} )

Cheers! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise, Plainclothes Hippi

That sounds like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which isn't all that fashionable. Nowadays cognitive anthropologists have nailed down some specific ways in which details of their language influence the way people behave, but it all seems to be pretty minor stuff.

Their hypothesis doesn't work for me - when I'm in serious debugging mode I find it really difficult to produce a written or spoken description of what I'm doing, and have to disengage from working on the circuit before I can write about it.

The very act of writing does give me a different (not necessarily better) insight into the circuit, which can sometimes be useful.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Reply to
bill.sloman

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