Comment by watersb

Ironically, Apple implemented dynamic hardware configuration long before it was a standard feature in PC platforms.

I was tempted to jump on the "two video cards" example, but the original IBM PC could support both a CGA (for color) and MDA (monochrome, sharper text) in the same host. I never did that myself, but every card I did use required you to flip switches or jumpers on each ISA board to configure its interrupts and memory address of its I/O ports.

Apple adopted NuBus for its Macintosh expansion platform. Boards were plug and play, automatically configured. Of course, the hardware required on the NuBus card to support this functionality was the better part of a whole separate Mac in its own right; the hardware dev kit cost $40,000.

Two video cards in a Mac just worked.

(Of course, I took your comment to refer to hardware less than 20 years old. But even now, there's dynamic hardware. Apple loved Thunderbolt because they wanted external expansion cards over a wire.)