The Modular PC

An idea I've been kicking around my head for at least 10 years is the modular PC. What's that?

Imagine a bricksized casing, slightly longer and thinner, with high-speed ports on all sides. Each brick would hold a part of the overall PC and would attach to other brings by stacking, being placed side-by-side, whatever - the ports would connect and link the components.

Individual bricks would hold the CPU, RAM, DVD, HD, and networking components. Other bricks could hold peripheral cards such as graphics and sound cards. Another could hold USB ports.

The brick housings themselves would be low-cost.

The big advantage of this architecture would be that you could swap out or add bricks as required over time to update your system. You might never need again to replace an entire computer.

Need another hard drive? Buy a hard drive brick and snap it onto the stack.

Now there may be a need for a bus controller brick but that's not a big deal I would think.

If upgrades were reduced to simple plug-ins then I would think the peripheral and upgrade market would explode as it would be cheaper and easier for the technically inept to pull off. The bricks would be plug-and-play.

What do you think?

UPDATE

Looks like someone's already done it to a degree, but not to the extent I was contemplating.