Neat, definitely a part of history that I'm not familiar enough with myself since I was only ~6 or so around then when the article was published.

It definitely seems to reinforce the joke backronym of "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms" for the whole thing given how badly it was all refered to. It's a lot like the whole Clippit/Clippy situation with the Microsoft Office assistants. Originally it was only named Clippit but Clippy got coined by everyone else and even Microsoft ended up giving in and using it in marketing materials not too long after the fact.

My understanding (probably wrong) is that pcmcia was based off the ISA bus and then pc card updated to pci based and express card was pcie

The Pi 3B doesn't have UEFI support, so it requires special support on the distro side for the boot process but for the 4 and newer you can flash (or it'll already be there, depending on luck and age of the device) the firmware on the board to support UEFI and USB boot, though installing is a bit of a pain since there's no easy images to do it with. https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi4

I believe some other distros also have UEFI booting/installers setup for PI4 and newer devices because of this, though there's a good chance you'll want some of the other libraries that come with Raspberry PI OS (aka Raspbian) still for some of the hardware specific features like CSI/DSI and some of the GPIO features that might not be fully upstreamed yet.

There's also a port of Proxmox called PXVirt (Formerly Proxmox Port) that exists to use a number of similar ARM systems now as a virtualization host with a nice ui and automation around it.

Pretty reasonable place to start. I'm curious how it would fare in an emc/rf test.

For IoT myself i'm wondering if it's something that could be thrown into the Matter side of things, make the hub/border router act as an ACME server with it's own CA that gives out mTLS certs so the devices can validate the hub and the hub can validate the devices. It'd never be implemented properly by the swarms of cheap hardware out there but I can dream...