One fad in the 1990's was agent-oriented computing. You'd have scripts that carried code and data from place to place. For instance, you might send a bidding agent with your strategies to eBay's marketplace where it would constantly look for stuff you'd be interested in doing only deals you'd want. In day and age of 28Kbps links, there were advantages to not having to constantly move data back and forth. One of most interesting options came from General Magic:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-oriented_programming

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_lang...