The JEIDA memory card standard was a popular memory card standard at the beginning of memory cards appearing on portable computers. JEIDA cards could be used to expand system memory or as a solid-state storage drive. Before the advent of the JEIDA standard, laptops had proprietary cards that were not interoperable with other manufacturers laptops, other laptop lines, or even other models in the same line.
The establishment of the JEIDA interface and cards across Japanese portables provoked a response from the US government, through SEMATECH, and thus PCMCIA was born. PCMCIA and JEIDA worked to solve this rift between the two competing standards, and merged into JEIDA 4.1 or PCMCIA 2.0 in 1991.