[flukus]

> We wouldn’t make applications. Rather we’d deliver components which could interoperate via a binary contract. Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application.

This is how .net got it's crappy generic name. Back in it's early days it (and SOAP) was sold as the glue that would stitch all this together, just add a web reference and you'd have all this functionality in your project. It was incredibly disappointing to get through all this marketing and eventually realize it was just an MS version of java. Enterprise java beans, CORBA, COM and probably some others were also efforts in this direction. These days it's REST and microservices.

[thethought]

There was also OLE before ActiveX/COM and later DCOM. But the DLL’s were always a constant.