Alan Kay originally thought about each object as a virtual machine not just each Smalltalk instance. In his own words [0]: > I thought of objects being like bi

Alan Kay originally thought about each object as a virtual machine not just each Smalltalk instance. In his own words [0]: > I thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual computers on a network, only able to communicate with messages So a Smalltalk instance is actually a system of systems. [0] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/58732/179286 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/58732/179286