It's possible to develop a personal computer whose hardware has been designed to run a programming environment as its operating system. In fact, these existed before. Lisp machines did it, and Smalltalk was developed precisely as this kind of system (on the Alto).
In the 80s and 90s when there was a lot of diversity in consumer personal computers, we were all missing a couple of important things: standards and standard interfaces / formats. The web is one such standard. If a system has a web browser, it can do a hell of a lot with other types of computers everywhere. But also notice how today, unlike 10-15 years ago, we don't worry as much about file formats etc. We don't worry as much about which piece of software runs on which platform, in part because of other standards.
All of that frees us up to try more unique personal computing environments again. At minimum, any such system would need to have a web browser as a user level application, since it already gives them access to email, calendar, and basically the rest of the world. In other words, the web browser no encompasses all of this crap that personal computing environments needed to develop in order to have something usable.
Personally I'd want something Smalltalk-like all the way down in the system. Want to inspect TCP/IP packets as they come and go? No problem, they're just Smalltalk objects like everything else in the system. Stuff like that.
In the 80s and 90s when there was a lot of diversity in consumer personal computers, we were all missing a couple of important things: standards and standard interfaces / formats. The web is one such standard. If a system has a web browser, it can do a hell of a lot with other types of computers everywhere. But also notice how today, unlike 10-15 years ago, we don't worry as much about file formats etc. We don't worry as much about which piece of software runs on which platform, in part because of other standards.
All of that frees us up to try more unique personal computing environments again. At minimum, any such system would need to have a web browser as a user level application, since it already gives them access to email, calendar, and basically the rest of the world. In other words, the web browser no encompasses all of this crap that personal computing environments needed to develop in order to have something usable.
Personally I'd want something Smalltalk-like all the way down in the system. Want to inspect TCP/IP packets as they come and go? No problem, they're just Smalltalk objects like everything else in the system. Stuff like that.