It was obviously inspired by many different things but the most direct genealogy is WEB [1] → noweb → Sweave → Knitr → R Markdown → R Notebooks. Mathematica’s

It was obviously inspired by many different things but the most direct genealogy is WEB [1] → noweb → Sweave → Knitr → R Markdown → R Notebooks. Mathematica’s notebook interface in turn was almost certainly also inspired (directly or indirectly) by WEB, given that this was the first literate programming tool ever created. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEB