I'm thinking something where the system maintains "objects" of arbitrary types, presumably they could include multiple other objects. You just access objects and the system makes them available - the object could be a document, a game, a purchase order, etc. The system would also handle moving them around - what we know as "networking".

(A little like Smalltalk.)

In that case, I see no need for lower level data. No need to read text into memory, no need to serialise anything, no need to open/read/write/close. So all the work we do to handle low level stuff becomes obsolete :) (Or at least provided once by OS programmers.)

Or perhaps WinFS?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS