Didn't realize I was doing "ledgers" way back at the University of Minnesota.  As you can see we weren't that excited writing line-of-business apps.  Also funny how Privacy Enhanced Mail never took off.  Pity that.

Here's the executive summary for Forms Nirvana from an old design doc:

This document describes an open-architecture forms routing and approval system suitable for routing requests through a multi-person authorization chain. Once a request has been authorized, the completed request can be automagically submitted to another system (for example, the financial system for posting to the general ledger). While WWW is initially envisioned as the vehicle for user interaction with the system, the request routing logic is separated from user presentation so that other technologies (such as E-mail with digital signatures) can be used as well. Provisions are also made for entities other than human signers to be part of the authorization chain, so consistency checks can be automatically applied to the form's content.

You can read more about Forms Nirvana in this Minnpost article.

Tagged: #throwbackthursday