According to Alan Kays 1971 description of Smalltalk:

“An object is a little computer that has its own memory, you send messages to it in order to tell it to do something. It can interact with other objects through messages in order to get that task done.”

Smalltalk concepts heavily informed the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) tenets, e.g.

1. Services are autonomous - Cohesive single responsibility.

2. Services have explicit boundaries - Loosely coupled, owns its data and business rules.

Choosing good service boundaries is really crucial for a successful, resilient, maintainable system.

There’s a nice synopsis at https://hemantkumar.net/services-microservices-bounded-conte... (2015)

“Cells” seems like the same thing but it’s IMO a nicer word for it.