I've been trying to remember the details of the following anecdote:
[Some guy] divined the principles of object-oriented programming by examining 80 lines of Simula source, which he mistook to be a degenerate form of Algol.
Who was the programming god that performed this epic feat? Kay, Stroustrup, Torvalds, someone else? Was it 80 lines? Was it Simula? What references confirm the story?
I thought the tale came from the Jargon file, but can't find it there.
The most similar incident I can think of was in Kay's Early History of Smalltalk:
"This is the Algol for the 1108. It doesn't work. Please make it work."
. . .Supposedly, this was the Case-Western Reserve 1107 Algol--but it had been doctored to make a language called Simula; the documentation read like Norwegian transliterated into English, which in fact it was. . .
Finally, another graduate student and I unrolled the program listing 80 feet down the hall and crawled over it yelling discoveries to each other. The weirdest part was the storage allocator, which did not obey a stack discipline as was usual for Algol. A few days later, that provided the clue. What Simula was allocating were structures very much like the instances of Sketchpad. There were descriptions that acted like masters and they could create instances, each of which was an independent entity. What Sketchpad called masters and instances, Simula called activities and processes. Moreover, Simula was a procedural language for controlling Sketchpad-like objects. . .
This was the big hit, and I've not been the same since.