Yes, you have the gist of our approach in the 60s and especially at Parc in the 70s. And the Doug McIlroy parts of Unix also got this (the "pipes" programming and other ideas).
What I called "objects" ca 1966 was a takeoff from Simula and Sketchpad that was highly influenced by both biology, by the "processes" (a kind of virtual computer) that were starting to be manifested by time-sharing systems, and by my research community's discussions and goals for doing an "ARPAnet" of distributed computers. If you took the basic elements to be "computers in communication" you could easily get the semantics of everything else (even to simulate data structures if you still thought you needed them).
So, yes, everything could be thought of as "servers". Smalltalk at Parc was entirely structured this way (and the demo I made from one of the Parc Smalltalks for the Ted Nelson tribute shows examples of this).
It's worth noting that you then have made a "software Internet", and this can be mapped in many ways over a physical Internet.
And so forth. This got quite missed. In a later interview Steve said that he missed a bunch of things from his visit to Parc in 1979. What was ironic was that the context of the interview was partly that the SW of the NEXT computer now did have these (in fact, not really).
To be a bit more fair, big culprits in the miss in the 80s were Motorola and Intel for not making IC CPUs with Chuck Thacker's emulation architectures that we used at Parc to be able run ultra high level languages efficiently enough. The other big culprit was that you could do -something- and sell it for a few thousand dollars, whereas what was needed was something whose price tag in the early 80s would have been more like $10K.
Note that a final culprit here is that the personal computer could not be seen for all it really was, and especially in the upcoming lives of most people. The average price of a car when the Mac came out was about $9K (that according to the web is about $20K today -- the average price of a car today is about $28K). To me a really good personal computer is worth every penny of $28K -- I'd love to be able to buy $28K of personal computer! One way to evaluate "the computer revolution" is to note not just what most people do with their computers in all forms, but what they are willing to pay. I think it will be a while before most people can see enough to put at least the value of a car on their "information and thinking amplifier vehicle"
What I called "objects" ca 1966 was a takeoff from Simula and Sketchpad that was highly influenced by both biology, by the "processes" (a kind of virtual computer) that were starting to be manifested by time-sharing systems, and by my research community's discussions and goals for doing an "ARPAnet" of distributed computers. If you took the basic elements to be "computers in communication" you could easily get the semantics of everything else (even to simulate data structures if you still thought you needed them).
So, yes, everything could be thought of as "servers". Smalltalk at Parc was entirely structured this way (and the demo I made from one of the Parc Smalltalks for the Ted Nelson tribute shows examples of this).
It's worth noting that you then have made a "software Internet", and this can be mapped in many ways over a physical Internet.
And so forth. This got quite missed. In a later interview Steve said that he missed a bunch of things from his visit to Parc in 1979. What was ironic was that the context of the interview was partly that the SW of the NEXT computer now did have these (in fact, not really).
To be a bit more fair, big culprits in the miss in the 80s were Motorola and Intel for not making IC CPUs with Chuck Thacker's emulation architectures that we used at Parc to be able run ultra high level languages efficiently enough. The other big culprit was that you could do -something- and sell it for a few thousand dollars, whereas what was needed was something whose price tag in the early 80s would have been more like $10K.
Note that a final culprit here is that the personal computer could not be seen for all it really was, and especially in the upcoming lives of most people. The average price of a car when the Mac came out was about $9K (that according to the web is about $20K today -- the average price of a car today is about $28K). To me a really good personal computer is worth every penny of $28K -- I'd love to be able to buy $28K of personal computer! One way to evaluate "the computer revolution" is to note not just what most people do with their computers in all forms, but what they are willing to pay. I think it will be a while before most people can see enough to put at least the value of a car on their "information and thinking amplifier vehicle"