>>>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.

AFAIRC only as to not be in danger of lawyers - you could format a 360KB compatible format if not using the Atari written OS...
...
>>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.

Maybe - but not sure if this was not a side effect stemming from implementing some routines in ROM for copyright reasons "different"