I called this idea "data-centric computing" in the 90's, though that has a different meaning, about memory organization in game development, these days. Basica

I called this idea "data-centric computing" in the 90's, though that has a different meaning, about memory organization in game development, these days. Basically data records live free from applications, so for example you can make a pasteboard that contains an image, an email, a couple of contact addresses, a map, or whatever, without having to go into an image editor, an email app, etc to get the data, or to have to link/embed those apps as in microsoft's 90's OLE/COM object embedding stuff. It differs from 'everything is a file', in that files contain a whole bundle of different data, and are 'opened' by a particular application or class of application, and are effectively a 'save state' of the application, whereas 'items' or data records or whatever are independent of any particular app; they have a type, and any app/tool that can deal with that type can operate on them.