[rmccue]

> To give some old-school examples, how differently might industrialization have gone if rail systems weren't mandated to operate under some shared standards?

I'm not sure that analogy holds particularly well. The UK did build rail systems without shared standards, and only standardised on gauge in 1846, which was very late in the industrial revolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Gauge_War - Standards for other things like signalling also came late, and broad gauge was still in use until 1892. (Notably though, this did happen just at the turn of Railway Mania, so affected a lot of the new lines.)

Effectively, the UK let (mainly by omission, not intentionally) the solutions compete and then selected the most broadly used solution to standardise on.

(I'd love to see any scholarly research on this though; I haven't seen a huge degree of it. Obviously things are different outside of the UK, but given it's where (uncoincidentally) both the industrial revolution and railways were born, that's the clear case to look at.)

[skohan]

> Effectively, the UK let (mainly by omission, not intentionally) the solutions compete and then selected the most broadly used solution to standardise on.

We're down to two connectors here, one of which is only used by a single vendor; do you think that hasn't already happened?

[rmccue]

I’m not questioning that at all! I’m only responding to the question posed by the parent about railway standardisation in the context of industrialisation.

[jen20]

What happened is the worse more common standard was converged upon, so instead of the west coast main line having a comfortable, stable 7’ gauge, we ended up with the less comfortable standard gauge that requires longer trains to seat the same number of people.