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.
This thing could probably be the future of computers, if RISC-based (Army, RISC-V) cluster computing, using multiple SoM (system on module) gains its popularity. But for that, first we’ll probably need some sort of specialised OS, perhaps something like Plan9 to grow.
Plan9 is sleeping. It works great and is actively developed, but I think it will remain a research OS. People/companies don’t want to buy a really effective solution they want a pinky promise from another company. We’ll eventually get embed windows on risc machines and it’ll suck.
Cluster computers will still be discrete tho. OP is aesthetic and cool. future computers will be piles of servers and silly iot devices and silly smartphones
Sort of… But it’s very different than a computer, it’s called a Programmable Logic Controller and it’s used in industrial applications. Best game I’ve ever seen one run was Doom.
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