Padware: The grandfather of widgets from 1995
I’m not sure why this suddenly popped into my head, but I was thinking about widgets today and I remembered an article in New Scientist from 1995 about a Japanese software project called Intelligent Pads. A bit of Googling turned up the article in the NS archive (unfortunately the screenshots weren’t preserved so you have to use your imagination,) but I can’t seem to find any other references to it online. I can only assume that the project died, perhaps because it was ahead of its time.
The idea behind Padware was a componentised software architecture, where a user could assemble their own user experience using simple visual building blocks called pads. Perhaps what we’d call widgets today.
“for example, you have a video of a ball falling on the video pad, you could overlay this with a transparent plotter pad that tracks the ball’s movements – so coloured dots would appear on top of the video picture. These movements can then be fed into a third pad on which a graph of the ball’s trajectory is being drawn.”
Intelligent Pads weren’t the first software component architecture, and object oriented programming was already well established at the time. The article talks about Microsoft’s OLE (Object Linking and Embedding,) however the key difference is that pads were designed to be distributed on the Internet, and also assembled by ordinary users without specific programming knowledge.
This all sounds very familiar to how we envisage the web evolving, with widgets providing the building blocks, and the semantic web creating a means for inter-communication.
It’s a shame that this project didn’t seem to get any traction. I think it was way ahead of its time.
Tom wrote this on 25.10.08 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Widgets box
