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The Jonathan concept of modular slices was a copy of the Convergent Technologies NGEN family of computers. frogdesign sold Apple the same packaging they had done two years earlier for Convergent. See the product family here: http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/convergent/...

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The concept isn't far removed from the S-100 [1]bus as seen in the Altair 8800, and you could probably find numerous other examples, weren't early IBM mainframes made up of standardised cards with a few nand gates on each?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus

Yes, early IBM CPUs were made of standardized cards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Solid_Logic_Technology. It references http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/logic/SY22-2798-2_LogicBloc... which has lots of detail)

Also, early Sun/SGI were modular on Multibus.

The vertical expansion blocks reminded me of the TI-99 expansion box:

http://www.fabbnet.net/images/TI%20at%20421.jpg

http://www.fabbnet.net/ti99.htm

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