[suraj]

Jupyter[1] lifted this feature from Matlab & made it work with any kernel.

[1]: http://jupyter-notebook.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/No...

[pedrosorio]

I believe it was inspired by Mathematica which created the concept of notebooks with cells backed by a kernel in 1988:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Mathematica#The_Notebo...