@tyler @charlie_root @kirby @sysrq That is a good paper. I was mostly asking which thing you meant rather than what you were talking about.

If you haven't seen Octopus, Octopus is very interesting. I ran it a little while (takes some tweaks to get it to build in $anno_domini Inferno) and I like the idea but there's a lot you have to build from scratch. But the way it's modeled gives you basically a fully serializable UI, and this means it can be reset to previous states or history preserved (consider combining it with venti) or transported or, since the structure is recursive, maybe you open a previous state in a panel and compare to the current one. (Shit like that sure as hell makes "I put the output of `git status` in my prompt" look like crayon scribbles.)
2006--give_me_back_my_personal_mainframe.pdf
2007--distributed_smart_spaces.pdf
2007--octopus_as_middleware.pdf
2007--styx_batching_for_high_latency.pdf
2007--towards_persistent_distributed_interfaces.pdf
2007--ui_in_octopus.pdf
2008--octopus_user_manual_2nd_ed.pdf
2008--using_the_octopus.pdf
2009--batching_design_pattern.pdf
2010--upperware_resources.pdf
2011--improving_styx_high_latency.pdf
2012--octopus_upperware_based_system.ps
2012--personal_pervasive_environments.pdf
belt.pdf