With Engelbart's NLS (oN Line System), everything was live and hyperlinked, van Dam said. NLS featured modern computing concepts such as links and groupware.

"We want to go back to the future of that wholly integrated environment," he said.

 (Engelbart's "mother of all demos," which featured NLS, occurred 40 years ago this week.)

Lamenting the current state of system design, Kay argued that there is a need to get people to understand what computers could do. Of the present situation, said Kay, "I would be very happy to burn the whole thing down and start over again."

Kay criticized the browser, saying it ruins the symmetric consumption and editing that was the hallmark of personal computing going back to NLS. He did, though, laud the new Google Chrome browser for retaining enough horsepower to perhaps enable doing something interesting with it.