Precisely! When Lisp Machine programmer look at a screen dump, they see a lot more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye.

I'll attempt to explain the deep implications of what the article said about "Everything on the screen is an object, mouse-sensitive and reusable":

There's a legendary story about Gyro hacking away on a Lisp Machine, when he accidentally trashed the function cell of an important primitive like AREF (or something like that -- I can't remember the details -- do you, Scott? Or does Devon just make this stuff up? ;), and that totally crashed the operating system.

It dumped him into a "cold load stream" where he could poke around at the memory image, so he clamored around the display list, a graph of live objects (currently in suspended animation) behind the windows on the screen, and found an instance where the original value of the function pointer had been printed out in hex (which of course was a numeric object that let you click up a menu to change its presentation, etc).

He grabbed the value of the function pointer out of that numeric object, poked it back into the function cell where it belonged, pressed the "Please proceed, Governor" button, and was immediately back up and running where he left off before the crash, like nothing had ever happened!

Here's another example of someone pulling themselves back up by their bootstraps without actually cold rebooting, thanks to the real time help of the networked Lisp Machine user community:

ftp://ftp.ai.sri.com/pub/mailing-lists/slug/900531/msg00339.html