> What I'm really asking is if a sufficiently determined person couldn't have avoided all these headaches by building and/or standardizing equivalent technologi

> What I'm really asking is if a sufficiently determined person couldn't have avoided all these headaches by building and/or standardizing equivalent technologies. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ The reason that this worked out in x86-land is that the entire industry spawned from cloning and making extensions for a single product, the IBM PC.