I guess the reason people keep coming back to being inspired by Vannevar Bush's Memex, Alan Kay's Dynabook and what have you is that the internet as it currently exists falls so far short of the dream of what a global information network could have been. Thank goodness that dreams like this keep popping up:
[This is going to be...] a very rough sketch of an idea about what a future computing system might look like. I don't know how to get from here to there, or even if 'there' is entirely satisfactory. But I feel that a 'there' roughly in this vicinity is somewhere we should be heading towards.
Let's start with what the 'here' is that is less satisfactory.
We currently have an Internet made of vast layers of complexity layered on each other; software layers going back to the 1960s at the very latest, built on traditions and workflows originated in the 1950s. Our current model of deploying computing services, 'the cloud', thinks nothing of **simulating entire computers* - with gigabytes of RAM and hundreds of gigabytes of disk - on other computers, just to get one service that listens on one TCP/IP port and sends a few bytes in response to a few other bytes. [Emphasis added]
The operating system inside these simulated computers-on-computers then consists of, essentially, an entire simulated computing department from the 1950s: a bank of clerks operating card punches (text editors and Interactive Development Environments), other clerks translating these punchcards from high-level to low-level languages (compiler toolchains), machine operators who load the right sets of cards into the machine (operating systems, schedulers, job control systems), banks of tape drives (filesystems and databases), printers (web servers, UIs )... and a whole bunch of prewritten software card stacks (libraries, component object systems, open source projects).
This seems a bit less than optimal. [...]
Just a bit, yes.
The point isn't that this essay points to an obvious right answer: it's that the current solutions fall so far short of what could be done. Building ever-taller stacks of old technology on top of stacks of even older technology might be good for maintaining the market share of the market leaders, but it's probably not the best way to get to where we'd like to be one day.
Anyway, the point is the essay I've linked to offers plenty of food for thought.