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>This meant that every user could have their own unique Jonathan setup, pulling together various software platforms, storage devices, and hardware capabilities

>This meant that every user could have their own unique Jonathan setup, pulling together various software platforms, storage devices, and hardware capabilities into their own personalized system. Imagining what would have been required for all this to work together gives me a headache. In addition to the shared backbone interface, there would need to be software written to make an almost-endless number of configurations work smoothly for the most demanding of users. It was all very ambitions, but perhaps a little too far-fetched. Sounds an awful lot like the mess which is Windows.

flohofwoe 3y ago
But it was exactly this "mess" of the accidentially opened PC platform what gave us the hardware cambrian explosion of the late 90s. Without this, Nvidia probably wouldn't exist, and everything that's not Apple would have an IBM logo slapped on ;)
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
It's a great idea from a consumer & aesthetic POV, but the technical challenges would have been interesting. It's also a reinvention of one-bus-for-different-boxes computing from the 70s - Unibus, Massbus, and so on. It could have been made to work, but it would have been speed-limited, and mechanically unreliable if it wasn't done exactly right.
wildzzz 3y ago
There are modern systems that still use this sort of modular backplane design. MicroTCA and PXIe are the two major ones, both providing at least power and a PCIe bus on the backplane. MicroTCA supports carrying Ethernet, SATA, and PCIe on the backplane. However both of these are more intended for industrial computing. I could see a consumer variation based on MicroTCA where the chassis has a pre installed controller and backplane. The backplane would be configurable based on the CPU you are running. Higher end CPU would allow for more PCIe lanes meaning more slots, lower end would only allow for a few slots. The computer part is provided by a heavily packaged SBC containing a processor and memory. Mass storage either sits on the SBC as m.2 or as a chassis card connected via SATA or PCIe. You'd have a GPU card connected to a x16 slot (up to two of these for a large chassis). High end sound card sits on another slot. Various interface cards sit on others. You could even drop in an FPGA accelerator card. This would all probably be too expensive for your average consumer though.
vidarh 3y ago
My Amiga 2000 had a PC on a card in it that used a window on my Amiga workbench as output. It's not like making weird stuff work together was unusual.
boomlinde 3y ago
This can be solved through reasonable abstraction. Windows does it, OS X does it, earlier Mac OS and pre-Mac Apple computers did it. Your application software doesn't need to know what exact disks you have in your system so long as it can interact with the disks through a standardized interface. Your application software doesn't need to know what other application software is running on your system so long as you can facilitate interoperability through shared resources like storage, clipboards and sockets using standardized formats and protocols. That's how systems have been designed to host arbitrary software and hardware in more than half a century. In OS X, `ls` doesn't know that `cat` exist, and neither know anything about your SSD, yet they have absolutely no problems interoperating.

flohofwoe 3y ago

But it was exactly this "mess" of the accidentially opened PC platform what gave us the hardware cambrian explosion of the late 90s. Without this, Nvidia probably wouldn't exist, and everything that's not Apple would have an IBM logo slapped on ;)

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

It's a great idea from a consumer & aesthetic POV, but the technical challenges would have been interesting. It's also a reinvention of one-bus-for-different-boxes computing from the 70s - Unibus, Massbus, and so on. It could have been made to work, but it would have been speed-limited, and mechanically unreliable if it wasn't done exactly right.

wildzzz 3y ago

There are modern systems that still use this sort of modular backplane design. MicroTCA and PXIe are the two major ones, both providing at least power and a PCIe bus on the backplane. MicroTCA supports carrying Ethernet, SATA, and PCIe on the backplane. However both of these are more intended for industrial computing. I could see a consumer variation based on MicroTCA where the chassis has a pre installed controller and backplane. The backplane would be configurable based on the CPU you are running. Higher end CPU would allow for more PCIe lanes meaning more slots, lower end would only allow for a few slots. The computer part is provided by a heavily packaged SBC containing a processor and memory. Mass storage either sits on the SBC as m.2 or as a chassis card connected via SATA or PCIe. You'd have a GPU card connected to a x16 slot (up to two of these for a large chassis). High end sound card sits on another slot. Various interface cards sit on others. You could even drop in an FPGA accelerator card. This would all probably be too expensive for your average consumer though.

vidarh 3y ago

My Amiga 2000 had a PC on a card in it that used a window on my Amiga workbench as output. It's not like making weird stuff work together was unusual.

boomlinde 3y ago

This can be solved through reasonable abstraction. Windows does it, OS X does it, earlier Mac OS and pre-Mac Apple computers did it. Your application software doesn't need to know what exact disks you have in your system so long as it can interact with the disks through a standardized interface. Your application software doesn't need to know what other application software is running on your system so long as you can facilitate interoperability through shared resources like storage, clipboards and sockets using standardized formats and protocols. That's how systems have been designed to host arbitrary software and hardware in more than half a century. In OS X, `ls` doesn't know that `cat` exist, and neither know anything about your SSD, yet they have absolutely no problems interoperating.