Butler Lampson: …It really makes you wonder when there’s going to be some substantial advance. The only substantial advance since the days of PARC that I know about is the Web. Which really is qualitatively different.

It’s an interesting question why it took so long to happen, which I have a theory about. My theory is that it’s entirely a matter of scale. It couldn’t happen until the Internet got big enough, because until then it wasn’t worth the hassle of organizing your stuff so that it would be accessible to other people. But things got above a certain scale. Then you could find a big enough user community that you actually cared about enough to be willing to do that work. Because from a technical point of view it could have happened 10 years earlier, I think. It’s just that it wouldn’t have paid.
Alan Kay: But I wish that you had been at CERN on a sabbatical when that…
B. Lampson: I probably would have been a disaster.
A. Kay: I don’t know. But I think you would have made a slightly better…

Lampson: No. No. No. No. No. No. What Tim Berners-Lee did was perfect. My view about the web is that it’s the great failure of computer systems research. Why did computer systems researchers not invent the web? And I can tell you the answer. It’s because it’s too simple.
Kay: It is too simple.
B L: If I had been there I would have mucked it up. I swear to God. The idea that you’re going to make a new TCP connection for every mouse click on a link? Madness! The idea that you’re going to have this crusty universal data type called HTML with all those stupid angle brackets? We never would have done that! But those were the things that allowed it to succeed.
A K: Yeah, to some extent.
L: Absolutely. Not ‘to some extent’. Absolutely. There’s some bad consequences…but that’s too bad. You’ve got to go with the flow, otherwise it would… No, it would have been a disaster. Never would have worked.