That was the thinking in the Forth community as well; no absolute frontier between language, library, OS and hardware.
But Ingalls was still wrong, because what actually made that recipe work at that time is that they were programming against a predefined hardware, like game consoles.
When you program for predefined hardware, an OS is basically a one man-month project (well, in the 80s at least).
IIRC 1981 was a bit before the IBM PC, whose selling point was its extensibility. Squeak's VM is exactly a way to come back to predefined hardware.
But of course if you get cocky and think you can rid of the OS because your VM is so funtastic, you end up with an inactive project like SqueakNOS. Either because the hardware diversity the OS protected you from hits you like a truck, or because you place strong restrictions on supported hardware - so not everyone who is willing to try it, can actually try it. That's very few people.
Its best hope to evolve from the PoC stage is to be paired with some hardware product. Like Forth when it was chosen for the OLPC project.
But Ingalls was still wrong, because what actually made that recipe work at that time is that they were programming against a predefined hardware, like game consoles. When you program for predefined hardware, an OS is basically a one man-month project (well, in the 80s at least).
IIRC 1981 was a bit before the IBM PC, whose selling point was its extensibility. Squeak's VM is exactly a way to come back to predefined hardware.
But of course if you get cocky and think you can rid of the OS because your VM is so funtastic, you end up with an inactive project like SqueakNOS. Either because the hardware diversity the OS protected you from hits you like a truck, or because you place strong restrictions on supported hardware - so not everyone who is willing to try it, can actually try it. That's very few people.
Its best hope to evolve from the PoC stage is to be paired with some hardware product. Like Forth when it was chosen for the OLPC project.