This was a very important article for me. I had been writing solo for some time. I needed to collaborate more, especially since I had been independent for almost a year and I was getting lonely for technical collaboration.

Bruce Anderson organized this fantastic workshop for IBM at its educational site in Thornwood, New York. Ralph Johnson was another one of the teachers. Late one night, I grabbed him and said, “I bet we can describe HotDraw using patterns.” He didn't know quite what I meant, but he has learned to humor me (probably because he's big enough to just bop me if I get out hand). There in a spartan little room in IBM's training facility in up state New York, we tried to recreate HotDraw using only patterns—this pattern tells us to create this object, then this pattern splits it in two, then…

The result was one of those crackling moments when you know you have something. Early the next morning, I described HotDraw to Desmond D'Souza, first using CRC cards the way I always had, then using the patterns. He confirmed that the pattern description communicated the “why” of the design much more clearly.

Ralph and I were confident enough of our findings that we wrote up the paper with a sweeping conclusion—any object architecture can be derived by applying a set of patterns.