With Simula 67 Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard invented object-oriented programming. This has had an enormous impact on program development tools and methods in the whole world, well accounted for in conferences and books on Programming Languages and on Object-Oriented Programming and on Software Pioneers. Early influenced were computer scientists in the Nordic countries who from about 1970 had Simula as the main programming tool, “mother tongue”. In this paper I give first hand account of experience of a uniquely early introduction of object-oriented programming for higher education in computer science and in computer programming, which gave us these powerful program development tools long before other educations, especially as it coincided with introduction of powerful interactive systems. I also want to challenge the misconception that Simula is primarily a tool for simulation, by illustrating how it was used to teach general computer science and programming concepts, with more general purpose constructs than most contemporary languages, except maybe Lisp.
QC 20120116