"As the name Simula suggests, this programming language was originally designed for the purpose of Simulation.
The language was designed by Dahl, Myhrhaug and Nygaard at the Norwegian Computing Center,
Oslo and the first version of the language, Simula-1, described in 1966, was strictly a Simulation language (like GPSS).
Soon thereafter, influenced by Hoare's ideas on records, the designers realized that they could
do dynamic modeling using a general purpose extensible language based on Algol-60.
This led to Simula-67, described in the Simula Common Base report. The extension mechanisms were classes and prefixing,
a form of inheritance with subtyping. Ten years later, the language was standardized and became known as simply Simula.
In addition to leading to modern Simula, Simula 67 was an inspiration to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) group
who developed Smalltalk and to Bjarne Stroustrop in his development of C++.
While Simula 67 had the central object-oriented concepts of inheritance and subtyping,
much of the popular mystique surrounding objects and object-oriented design developed later as a result of other efforts,
most notably the work of Alan Kay and his collaborators at Xerox PARC." (John Mitchell)