In a comment to my earlier post on the Widget- Gadget food fight, PB reminded me about Active Desktop. The linked page from Microsoft’s, dated August 2001, includes this text:
The Microsoft Investor Ticker below is just one example of Active Desktop items—live content that Internet Explorer 4.0 lets you bring from the Web to your Active Desktop. Check out the list below. You’ll find cool items that deliver regularly updated news, entertainment, tools, and more.
I remember writing about Active Desktop in 1997, when I was working on a beta copy of Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 4.0.
And sure enough, a little poking around found this October 1997 article from Microsoft Systems Journal. It contains the first reference I can remember to Dynamic HTML, plus discussions of the Channel Definition Format (a very early use of XML that was a precursor to RSS), an Information Delivery API, support for Broadcast TV, and a bunch of other stuff that today we take for granted.
The Wikipedia entry for Active Desktop notes:
Active Desktop works much like desktop widget technology in that it allows users to place customized information on their desktop. [emphasis added]
Splat!
Ed Bott 
Actually some the word widgets goes back to 1920’s and was first with computers in the Amiga (MUI) Magic User Interface. So once again Amiga was way ahead of it’s time. Along being the computer where the World Wide Web all began. 3-D gaming and much of modern GUI began. Linux was next on the scene with Widgets and Eplets.
Next of course were Sun’s Java Applets. And about the same time Windows brought out Active Desktop, but these were never seen as or termed widgets as they were fixed unanimated and lacked user controls. Off and On are it!
More recently, because of the Active X and VBS scripting they have been used to install malware and take over a user’s desktop.
Sorry to burst your bubble!
an awsum sight keep on goin whoo