Interestingly, there was an ancient Greek / Roman equivalent: amphora (pottery vases) with bumps that fit into standard cargo racks in ships.

The first picture in the Wikipedia article is what I mean: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphora .

It's amazing that something that seems as obvious and simple as "shipping stuff in a box" is a relatively recent innovation.

Makes me wonder what seemingly obvious thing we're not aware of right now that will be commonplace 50 years from now.

There were always boxes, but I think the real game changer was standardizing the size and other properties of the box, across the planet.

Absolutely - standardisation is the path to ubiquity. From the screw thread to the accidental standard (ISA) of the IBM PC.

It removes many of the barriers to competition and reduces the risk of large players creating monopolies.

I think it’s fair to say that much of what we see in tech is deliberately engineered to avoid standardisation in order to protect competitive advantage.

Wired did an interesting article on standardisation years ago.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.wired.com/2002/01/standar...

Think about railroads and even early highways. It’s hard to standardize before you have a problem.

Containers have big downsides too... but technology allowed costs to be vaporized with containers.

The other big thing is that containers appeared in the US as the railroads entered their death spirals. You can build a dock anywhere and have trucks show up from 100 companies quickly compared to the negotiation required to live railroads. Think about how quickly the NYC maritime business died and moved to New Jersey... that’s a market that represented ~10-15% of the US population at that time.

Eventually we will figure out better protocols for data federation, replacing centralization of digital infrastructure with standardization.