The Evolution of Smart Contracts

I worked on the first production smart contract in 1989. It wasn't called smart contracts at the time until Nick Zabo came along and we had a larger community at Xanadu, which is where hypertext was invented AMIX. There was a huge new way of doing businesses that was a non-trivial contributor to the boom of the internet. The model of an intermediary enabling third parties to do business with each other existed before blockchain.