I came across this pdf from the 90's about UAIF, if you read the quotes below, it is remarkably similar to what Blockchain and Satoshi's Bitcoin is in principle.
What is UAIF? Acronym for
Unified Accounting Information Framework, it was a bank accounting system,
You can read more about it on the original pdf here. Off course Blockchain was not an eureka! moment and it evolved into what it is thanks to JS and millions of caloused fingers. But what do you think? How close was this accounting system to what Blockchain is in terms of principles? I mean at the core of both of these lies the same idea of a
distributed ledger system.
We therefore propose an open system oriented approach - Unified Accounting Information Framework
(UAIF) that is based on an industrial standard CORBA architecture to overcome the aforementioned limitation.
UAIFs mission is to promote true distributed client -server processing and inter-applications communication in order
to facilitate electronic exchange of standard business documents between third parties. Instead of scrapping the
legacy systems, this framework takes advantage of distributed object technology, on-line detection system (Booch
1991, Clark 1994, CORBA 1995), XML and OMG General Ledger (GL) Facility, which can improve the quality and
accuracy of accounting information for specific industry and can be viewed as an enabling technology for
continuous reviewing and auditing (AICPA, 1995, Booch, 1991).
Distributed Object Technology
The next wave of client/server technology must be able to handle multiuse, consumer-to-business, and
business-to-business transactions across multiple servers distributed over global networks. Existing distributed
system such as the Object Management Groups CORBA, the Open Groups DCE, Sun Microsofts Enterprise
JavaBeans, or Microsofts Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), not only permit applications and data to
reside on different platforms such as UNIX or NT system, but also require them to work together seamlessly and
support various business processes. In all of these environments, server applications are designed to advertise
interfaces to services, or functions, that they offer. Clients locate these services by searching a directory and bind to
the desired services using the information stored in the directory.
Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is one of the well-known distributed middleware
that is proposed by a consortium Object Management Group (OMG). CORBA promotes interoperability,
extensibility, portability, distributed processing and asynchronous operations all within an environment adhering to
open systems standards and providing improved performances (Lee 1995). If widely adopted, CORBA may have a
profound impact on AIS software marketplace.
