I also collect old models, centralized or not, in case they're useful in modern situations (esp intranet) for reliability or security especially. What do you think of Tannenbaum et al's Globe model as WWW alternative?

https://cds.cern.ch/record/400321/files/p117.pdf

I thought it was an interesting design that provided nice way of reducing abstraction gaps and rework in the various layers/techs. They integrated it with their Amoeba OS that ran on cluster of workstations w/ single, system image.

Wasn't familiar with this so I skimmed the IEEE paper:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=7...

Interesting that it references the Legion OS work that Greg Lindahl spoke about at the Summit:

http://legion.virginia.edu/

At first glance Globe feels like a low-level solution for the problem. Mapping objects to binaries via a broker and all that.

The web we have today solved much of the issues in other ways. Anycast DNS and CDNs allow for content distribution. Storing state in cookies allows for Operational transform and other eventually consistent techniques.

Thanks for the reference and connecting a few dots!