The functional programming language Clean has a high level I/O system (version 0.8) in which complex yet efficient interactive programs can be created. In this paper we present its successor (version 1.0), the object I/O system. We consider some of the design considerations that have influenced the design of the new I/O system greatly. Key issues are compositionality, orthogonality, and extensibility. Apart from design, the object I/O system improves on its predecessor by two major contributions: programmers can introduce polymorphic local state at every (collection of) user interface component(s) and programmers can create interactive processes in a flexible way. All interface components can communicate with each other by sharing state but also using powerful message passing primitives in both synchronous, asynchronous, and uni- or bi-directional way. Using the message passing mechanism remote procedure calling can be added easily. The result is an object oriented I/O system. As in the previous system the uniqueness type system of Clean, offering the possibility to do destructive updates in a pure functional framework, plays a crucial role. Furthermore, the object I/O system makes extensive use of new type system facilities, namely type constructor classes and existential types.