If you want to have a system that's network-capable, which is pretty much mandatory for a _really_ usable system in this day and age, i) that means Web-capable, and ii) if it's Web-capable today, it has to be able to handle what I dub 'active content' (JavaScript, etc) - i.e. content coming off the network which contains code, which runs in the local machine.

To paraphrase a certain well-known SF work, IMO active content is probably the worst idea since humans' fore-fathers crawled out of the mud.

I mourn the early days of the Web, when there was no active content - just text, images, etc, etc.

I am _very much_ in sympathy with the complaints here; I too feel that modern computers are too complex, etc. (Although some of it, like the entire computer turning into a single chip, were/are inevitable/unavoidable.) I like the functionality of modern system, but I feel they are _more complex than they need to be_ to generate that level of functionality. However, one thing I am going to quibble with: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ complicated. Note the part I highlighted. If you want to have a system that's network-capable, which is pretty much mandatory for a _really_ usable system in this day and age, i) that means Web-capable, and ii) if it's Web-capable today, it has to be able to handle what I dub 'active content' (JavaScript, etc) - i.e. content coming off the network which contains code, which runs in the local machine. To paraphrase a certain well-known SF work, IMO active content is probably the worst idea since humans' fore-fathers crawled out of the mud. It's _potentially_ a giant, gaping security hole - one that in today's OS's is responsible for a huge share of security issues. (There _is_ a way to have systems which aren't as vulnerable, but it means having military-grade security on everyone's machine - and no, I don't mean crypto; probably not likely, alas.) I mourn the early days of the Web, when there was no active content - just text, images, etc, etc. But no, they had to add all sorts of flashy eye candy - and did so in a way that makes basically all modern machines horribly insecure. But let me dispense with the soap box... Anyway, the inevitable consequence is that if you want a networked machine, it's _not_ going to be simple. Alas. You're basically sharing the machine with _lots_ of other people - effectively, every Tom, Dick and Jane out there in the Internet. In other words, you need everything one normally saw/sees in a time-sharing machine. (And I'm not talking about wimpy ones like Unix/Linux. I mean industrial strength ones like Multics.) Noel