The emergence of object-oriented technology: the role of community

Abstract

On the basis of an analysis of contemporaneous materials, we present a history of object-oriented technology from the late 1970s, when object orientation was little known, until the early 1990s, when object-oriented technology was widely accepted across computer science. We identify three phases of emergence: interpretative flexibility; community and dissemination; and pervasiveness. We describe the role of various communities, constituencies, fora and programming languages, and show how the intellectual history of an idea underpinning a technology differs from that technology's path of adoption.

Keywords:

• community
• OOPSLA
• Smalltalk
• social history

Notes

1. In the form we describe, Byte magazine ceased publication in 1998.

2. In this sense, Goldberg and Robson can almost be seen as subscribing to our thesis of variation in significance. They state: ‘Writing this first book about the Smalltalk-80 system was a complex task, partially due to the sociology of the system's creation, and partially due to the diverse kinds of information people require about such a system’.

3. The other three perspectives are: ‘Smalltalk is a vision. Smalltalk is based on a small number of concepts, but defined by unusual terminology. Smalltalk is a big system’.

4. The cover of the August 1981 issue had a picture of a balloon rising from a sea tower, signifying the ‘lift-off’ of Smalltalk from its esoteric research background.

5. This issue (June 1987) of Byte also reviewed another new product – the Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit.