Alan was a Molecular Biology major in college and has stated before that the basis for OO messages was originally inspired by cellular communication:
> 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 do messaging in a programming language efficiently enough to be useful).
> 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 do messaging in a programming language efficiently enough to be useful).