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Way before that — the X window system.

It's not seamless though, and that makes it a very different idea.

He's talking about it working at the same level as a browser where it sees if you have HTML5, and if not falls back to flash, dynamically.

I can't imagine it being a high priority - fiddly, low return, creates huge performance issues. Lots of basic problems - you don't want someone supplying input to a game over a (latent) network. You don't want to be running instances of performance-intensive games on your webserver.

Still - the proposed idea is distinct from VNC or X.

You can implement this (somewhat wastefully) using VirtualBox and VNC.

My point above is that there's a vast difference between (1) something being possible by a tech-savvy user spending time to jury-rig a solution, and doing it on a case-by-case basis and (2) the same kind of thing being done as a commodity - something that runs commonly on the platform with no effort on the part of end-users.

Maybe there's not as much difference as you might think. Look up Paul Farnell and Litmus. You can listen to his Mixergy interview from January.

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