On 17 September 1987, programmer Ward Cunningham with Tektronix and Apple Computer's Kent Beck co-published the paper "Using Pattern Languages for Object-Oriented Programs"[2] This paper, about software design patterns, was inspired by Christopher Alexander's architectural concept of "patterns"[2] It was written for the 1987 OOPSLA programming conference organized by the Association for Computing Machinery.
Cunningham & Cunningham, the programming consultancy that would eventually host the PPR on its Internet domain, was incorporated in Salem, Oregon, on 1 November 1991, and is named after Ward and his wife, Karen R. Cunningham, a mathematician, school teacher, and school director.
Ward created the Portland Pattern Repository on c2.com as a means to help object-oriented programmers publish their computer programming patterns by submitting them to him.
Some of those programmers attended the OOPSLA and PLoP conferences about object-oriented programming, and posted their ideas on the PPR.
The PPR is accompanied, on c2.com, by the first ever wiki, a collection of reader-modifiable Web pages, which is named WikiWikiWeb.