That wiki page says > According to Stephen Wolfram: "The idea of a notebook is to have an interactive document that freely mixes code, results, graphics, text

That wiki page says > According to Stephen Wolfram: "The idea of a notebook is to have an interactive document that freely mixes code, results, graphics, text and everything else. By that description Smalltalk with its workspace goes back to the 70s. (I don't know if there's anything closer to the Mathematica notebooks from that era.)