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The Apple Jonathan: A Very 1980s Concept Computer That Never Shipped (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 months ago by udo@lemmy.ml to c/mac@lemmy.ml

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This concept envisioned a computer that would expand with the needs of the user, through the use of modular components

https://512pixels.net/2024/03/apple-jonathan-modular-concept/

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[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 months ago

Oh hey, one of my marginalia scribbles from the early 2000s had deep prior art. I was really hand-waving the capabilities of USB2... and picturing a vertical stack of fixed-footprint components. Back then, they would've needed an absolute shitload of pins, and these cases are friggin' massive if everything's sitting flat across a desk. Even the small stack in contemporary mockups is a fat cube.

It almost makes sense if it's a throwback to Altair / S100 backplanes. Like your motherboard is just a row of PCI slots. Raw bus. You could expand that by daisy-chaining units. Might even be able to hot-swap entire drives so long as the OS knows you're about to.