The technical use of the term agent can be characterized into three overlapping periods.
- AI period (1960+): the
term was used by the artificial intelligence community, often in the grammatical sense.
- Network Design Period: (1975+): the community of Internet network designers used the
term in a way similar to our own: a service that acted on the behalf of another.
- Autonomous Period (1990+): the decade of the agent: where the concept of potentially
intelligent, autonomous computer programs that interact with each other within a networked
community is -- nearly -- over-hyped. It was also during this latter period that the term proxy
became widely used.
