(a) Intel and Motorola, etc. getting really interested in the Parc HW architectures that allowed Very High Level Languages to be efficiently implemented. Not having this in the 80s brought "not very good ideas from the 50s and 60s" back into programming, and was one of the big factors in:
(b) the huge propensity of "we know how to program" etc., that was the other big factor preventing the best software practices from the 70s from being the start of much better programming, operating systems, etc. in the 1980s, rather the reversion to weak methods (from which we really haven't recovered).
(c) The use of "best ideas about destiny of computing" e.g. in the ARPA community, rather than weak gestures e.g. the really poorly conceived WWW vs the really important and needed ideas of Engelbart.
Or shall we reboot good ideas with IoT?
X11 was not the best designed GUI framework, from what I understand. I'd heard some complaints about it over the years, but at least it was designed to work over a network, which no other GUI framework of the time I knew about could. It could have been improved upon to create a safer network standard, if some effort had been put into it.
As Alan Kay said elsewhere on this thread, it's difficult to predict what will become popular next, even if something is improved to a point where it could reasonably be used as a substitute for something of lower quality. So, I don't know how to "bring X11 back." As he also said, the better ideas which ultimately became popularly adopted were ones that didn't have competitors already in the marketplace. So, in essence, the concept seemed new and interesting enough to enough people that the only way to get access to it was to adopt the better idea. In the case of X11, by the time the internet was privatized, and had become popular, there were already other competing GUIs, and web browsers became the de facto way people experienced the internet in a way that they felt was simple enough for them to use. I remember one technologist describing the browser as being like a consumer "radio" for the internet. That's a pretty good analogy.
Leaving that aside, it's been interesting to me to see that thick clients have actually made a comeback, taking a huge chunk out of the web. What was done with them is what I just suggested should've been done with X11: The protocol was (partly) improved. In typical fashion, the industry didn't quite get what should happen. They deliberately broke aspects of the OS that once allowed more user control, and they made using software a curated service, to make existing thick client technology safer to use. The thinking was, not without some rationale, that allowing user control led to lots and lots of customer support calls, because people are curious, and usually don't know what they're doing. The thing was, the industry didn't try to help people understand what was possible. Back when X11 was an interesting and productive way you could use Unix, the industry hadn't figured out how to make computers appealing to most consumers, and so in order to attract any buyers, they were forced into providing some help in understanding what they could do with the operating system, and/or the programming language that came with it. The learning curve was a bit steeper, but that also had the effect of limiting the size of the market. As the market has discovered, the path of least resistance is to make the interface simple, and low-hassle, and utterly powerless from a computational standpoint, essentially turning a computer into a device, like a Swiss Army knife.
I think a better answer than IoT is education, helping people to understand that there is something to be had with this new idea. It doesn't just involve learning to use the technology. As Alan Kay has said, in a phrase that I think deserves to be explored deeply, "The music is not in the piano."
It's not an easy thing to do, but it's worth doing, and even educators like Alan continue to explore how to do this.
This is just my opinion, as it comes out of my own personal experience, but I think it's borne out in the experience of many of the people who have participated in this AMA: I think an important place to start in all of this is helping people to even hear that "music," and an important thing to realize is you don't even need a computer to teach people how to hear it. It's just that the computer is the best thing that's been invented so far for expressing it.
That is why now I am very interested in containers and microservices in both local and network senses.
As a "consumer", I am also very comfortable to communicate with people via message apps like WeChat and passing wikipedia and GitHub links around. Some of them are JavaScript "web apps" written and published in GitHub by typing on my iPhone. Here is an example:
http://bigdata-mindstorms.github.io/d3-playground/ontouchsta...
Hope I can help more people to "hear the music" and _make_ and _share_ their own.