>>Just try to remember the other personal computers at the time - the 8 and 16 bit world of then. There weren't any interchangeable parts. The guys couldn't even agree to the floppy size - Schneider was pushing 3", Atari and a few others were on 3.5".
>
>Floppies were 5.25 or larger - but formated differently. 3.5 came much later...

My point exactly - even after switching to smaller floppies, they still didn't have a standard format. Atari, though, could read DOS floppies, and could write to them, but whichever floppy it formatted wouldn't open on a PC.

>>And since the advent of IBM PC, you could have six machines from different manufacturers, disassemble them, shuffle the parts, assemble at random, and at least four of these would work.
>>If that's not a revolution, I don't know what is.
>
>Then Compaq was the real revolutionary, as they about defined how to clone without opening the doors for lawyers...

Maybe, but it was a step away from interchangeable parts. Compaq had some cards which wouldn't work on other machines, and some standard cards wouldn't work on some of their machines.