> they don't leave you any way to leave their world to go get something from the real OS, or the bare metal, or wherever "outside" is.

Pretty sure the idea was and is to run Smalltalk on bare metal. Which you can absolutely do.

The more realistic problem is: what if you still need Firefox, or Office, or Photoshop? One solution is probably to run Windows and Smalltalk on a hypervisor. You still get low-level access from Smalltalk (hypervisor calls, hardware access, etc.) without giving up Windows (or Linux, etc.) apps and compatibility.

Running a web browser in a hypervisor is also probably a good idea for isolation reasons.

Another interesting idea is to run Smalltalk on the JVM (which itself was inspired by the Self and Smalltalk VMs.) You lose some low level access from Smalltalk but you gain interoperability with Java as well as portability.

In a sense that's a valid point, but what we have seems inferior in this regard. My machine is running a huge amount of individual, uncoordinated runtimes. Often there's layers and layers of uncoordinated bloat, communication overhead and everyone does his own garbage collection, scheduling format translation, gui rendering and so on. It's incredibly wasteful and the only thing that patches over it is that my computer is fast enough to handle all this crap.

/rant

I get that all of this has reasons, often historical. PC/Internet adoption just grew so fast during 80's and 90's that nobody even had the time to think it all through and design a coherent system. Even new OS's and runtimes have to carry over all this legacy stuff. I mean I get it and as a web developer I'm probably more part of the problem than the solution. But boy would computing be simpler, more powerful and expressive if we could just start over and lean on the ideas of (mostly) early, holistic visions and prototypes of personal computing.

  I mean I get it and as a web developer I'm probably more part of the problem than the solution.

Ironic Humblebrag? The developer tools and consoles built into browsers are in some ways a return to the Smalltalk and LISP Machine development ideals I've read about, if you consider the Internet the machine.