> This meant that every user could have their own unique Jonathan setup, pulling together various software platforms, storage devices, and hardware capabilities

> This meant that every user could have their own unique Jonathan setup, pulling together various software platforms, storage devices, and hardware capabilities into their own personalized system. Imagining what would have been required for all this to work together gives me a headache. Whao. On the contrary, I could imagine plenty of ways in which it would _simplify_ stuff. Imagine if, instead of having a single computer juggling between many software process contending for the same resources, each application was its own mini-computer, with physical separation of memory and processing, and a single, hardware defined way of sharing data ? At this point, our computers are dumb terminals for computation happening on someone else software, so we're forced to develop distributed systems anyway. But having hardware separation forces doing the only sane thing (the old "share memory by communicating values", as opposed to "communicate commands and share memory") Sort of, OTP/Erlang on multiple chips of the same desktop box ?