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

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.