the popularity of peer-to-peer systems like gnutella have been making this vision seem more and more plausible:
“A new model is emerging from the Internet. It represents the culmination of years of incremental evolution in the structure of the network and the clients that feed upon it. It is based upon the same principles upon which the Internet was founded. It is this: the client is the server.”
i think dave deserves credit for an early, clear articulation of this concept, which he termed (rather unwieldly) “Fractional Horsepower HTTP Servers”.