Some time after Java first came out, there was a product called Voyager from a Java products company called Objectspace [1]. Voyager was a product for creating and using mobile agents. I had downloaded the trial and tried it out a bit. It was quite cool. IIRC, Graham Glass, who was involved in ObjectSpace, was also the creator of Electric XML, an XML library, and was later CTO of WebObjects. Recently he had/has been working on EDU 2.0 (EDU20.org), an e-learning product company.

[1] They were also the creators of JGL, the Java Generics Library, which was like a Java version of the C++ STL, and done before Java got generics natively.

That's pretty good, hadn't seen that clip. I think the pervasive networking mentioned has enabled the paradigm but wasn't quite the driver Kay thought it would be. RPCs (of some type) over HTTP have won over having mobile code. On the other hand, I still see a big upside in using agents for their deployment and component (in the divisible whole sense) organization of software.