While slightly different, the first place I remember hearing the term was Java. It was solving a slightly different problem: primitive types were not objects. Y

While slightly different, the first place I remember hearing the term was Java. It was solving a slightly different problem: primitive types were not objects. You’d have an int, but many data structures require the things you stored to be subclasses of Object. There were a bunch of objects with names like Integer that you could use instead, but in the early days there was a non-trivial performance hit associated with the “boxed” values.