Its initial purpose was to provide high-level programming language support for the Dynamic Modeling Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Project MAC.
[6] The initial development team consisted of Gerald Sussman and Carl Hewitt of the Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Chris Reeve, Bruce Daniels, and David Cressey of the Dynamic Modeling Group.
Gerald Sussman went on to develop the Scheme language, in collaboration with Guy Steele, who later wrote the specifications for Common Lisp and Java.
Smalltalk and Simula, in turn, influenced Hewitt's future work on the actor model.
[7] Later, Reeve, Daniels, Galley and other members of Dynamic Modeling went on to start Infocom, a company that produced many early commercial works of interactive fiction.