It was developed in Switzerland, at ETH Zurich, in the mid-1970s by Niklaus Wirth, the same person who designed Pascal.
The main innovation of Modula over Pascal is a module system, used for grouping sets of related declarations into program units; hence the name Modula.
The language is defined in a report by Wirth called Modula.
Very soon, other implementations followed, most importantly, the compilers developed for University of York Modula, and one at Philips Laboratories named PL Modula, which generated code for the LSI-11 microprocessor.
Wirth then concentrated his efforts on Modula's successor, Modula-2.