Category: 3. History

Terminology invoking “objects” in the modern sense of object-oriented programming made its first appearance at the artificial intelligence group at MIT in the late 1950s and early 1960s. “Object” referred to LISP atoms with identified properties (attributes).[5][6] Another early MIT example was Sketchpad created by Ivan Sutherland in 1960–1961; in the glossary of the 1963 technical report based on his dissertation about Sketchpad, Sutherland defined notions…