Yeah, right.

"Anyone alive in 1958 could understand the programming languages we have today. Physicists would be surprised by what we know in physics today. That's bad."

A little exaggeration there. I think there would be at least a few that couldn't. But as programming languages become more abstract and expressive, they become easier to understand anyway, so I'm not sure what he's talking about.

I agree that the Internet is one of these ULSs - it also has all the characteristics that seem to strike this guy as so hard to achieve. It's too complex for any single person to understand, it's large, it's modular and it's fault tolerant.

IMHO, what we're likely to see is a lot of small devices in the future. It doesn't seem unlikely that these will be in constant or near constant contact with a wireless network; I suspect the real ultra-large systems will be more like (legitimate) botnets running on powerful mobile devices than data centres or mainframes.