Watching "The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake" by Casey Muratori.

Douglas T. Ross was on the Algol 68 committee with C.A.R. Hoare, where Hoare probably got the ideas for "Record Handling" from the "plex" record-like structure that Ross had previously worked on.

This idea influenced the idea of not only the "Record Handling", but also the programming language Smalltalk. One of the influences for Smalltalk was a drawing program called Sketchpad.

Douglas T. Ross was working at MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory in Cambridge, MA in 1952 and recognized a a limitation in Lisp: Computation could only be done on types that have only two components, and you couldn't do work with types that had more than two without making a list. He suggested the "plex" idea, which are essentially structs.

Ivan Sutherland eventually starts working there and makes a program for drawing lines called Sketchpad. Douglas Ross suggested the idea of plex to Ivan Sutherland during the development of plex.