Today in Tedium: Computing has changed a lot in the past four decades, and one of the biggest changes, perhaps the most unheralded, comes down to compatibility. These days, you generally can’t fry a computer by plugging in a joystick that the computer doesn’t support. Simply put, standardization slowly fixed this. One of the best examples of a bedrock standard? PCI, the peripheral component interface, which came about in the early 1990s and appeared in some of its earliest consumer machines thre...