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by andsoitis 1438 days ago
Haha.

Alan Kay wrote: "At Utah sometime after Nov 66 when, influenced by Sketchpad, Simula,

the design for the ARPAnet, the Burroughs B5000, and my background in

Biology and Mathematics, I thought of an architecture for

programming. It was probably in 1967 when someone asked me what I was

doing, and I said: "It's object-oriented programming".

The original conception of it had the following parts.

  - I thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual 
computers on a network, only able to communicate with messages (so

messaging came at the very beginning -- it took a while to see how to

do messaging in a programming language efficiently enough to be

useful)."

http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay...

1 comments

It's interesting to note that he explicitly mentions "November 1966" and also refers to Simula. The ACM paper about Simula I appeared in September 1966 (see https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365813.365819), so he might have read it. Simula (or Simula I as it is called today) was a language to support discrete event simulation and had active objects (called "processes") for that purpose which "sent events" to each other (i.e. the process is activated at the event time). The language was already presented in 1962 at the second international conference on information processing held in Munich. The actually "object-oriented" Simula version with classes, inheritance and virtual methods appeared in 1967. Kay's vision applies to Smalltalk-72 to some degree, but Smalltalk-76 then also switched to inheritance and compiled virtual methods.