Back in late '80's out of St Andrews and Glasgow, there was a bunch of research into persistent object environments. Here's a paper:

https://archive.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/papers/download/MBC+88.p...

In short imagine Java or C++ objects, but they can live in a soup in a persistent database.

Imagine if your programming assignments at school, were "open this database then write a client to talk to the object retrieved." That's what we actually had in PS-Algol in 86. Super cool!