Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

Thank you. I hope to meet or communicate with Mr Burke at some point soon, I know Dan Carlin had a podcast with him a little while back if you're interested in his new take on the world. Connections remains the high water mark for documentary making and it is worth reading the books. If you want to watch a documentary in a similar style I suggest The Ascent of Man.

> In a sense, I think that although television itself isn't interactive, you could say that our family was 'interactive about' television. So we got the benefits of being able to use television in a positive way.

I believe you, I am mainly thinking of the average 5 hours per day the average American (or European) spends in front of the television. The dose makes the poison!

> This really resonated with me at the time, given that I was really getting into the Space Quest & other 'Quest games

Yes, it is clear that videogaming can provide for a shared community and culture, most obviously the MMORPGS. This is not something television achieves, or if it does, it is rare, like fans of Mythbusters or Connections. In the present we are concerned with developing the foundations of the Net, like commerce or the law. But ultimately I think a Net culture will be the most valued feature we ascribe to the Net.

Maybe the trick is something close to this: we need an Internet where it's very easy to do not only WYSIWYG document composition and publishing (which is what the web originally was, minus the WYSIWYG), but really deliver any kind of user experience we want (like VR, for example). It should be based on a network OS (an abstract, extensible microkernel on steroids) where user experiences of the network are actually programs with their own microkernel systems (sort of like an updated take on postscript). The network OS can security check the interpreters and quota and deal out resources and the microkernels that deliver user experiences like documents can be updated as what we want to do changes over time. I think we'd have something more in this direction (although I'm sure I missed any number of obvious problems) if we were to actually pass Alan Kay's OS-101 class as an industry.

We actually sort of very briefly started heading in this direction with Marimba's "Castanet" back at the beginning of Java and I was WILDLY excited to see us trying something less dumb than the browser. Unfortunately, it would seem that economic pressures pushed Marimba into becoming a software deployment provider, which is really not what I think they were originally trying to do. Castanet should have become the OS of the web. I think Java still has the potential to create something much better than the web because a ubiquitous and very mature virtual machine is a very powerful thing, but I don't see anyone trying go there. There's this mentality of "nobody would install something better." And yet we installed Netscape and even IE...

BTW, I do think the security problems of running untrusted code are potentially solvable (at least so much as any network security problems are) using a proper messaging microkernel architecture with the trusted resource-accessing code running in one process and the untrusted code running in another. The problem with the Java sandbox (so far as I understand all that) is that it's in-process. The scary code runs with the trusted code. In theory, Java is controlled enough to protect us from the scary code, but in practice, people are really smart and one tiny screw-up in the JVM or the JDK and bad code gets permissions it shouldn't have. A lot of these errors could be controlled or eliminated by separating the trusted code from the untrusted code as in Windows NT (even if only by making the protocol for resource permissions really clear).