Kay's use of "messaging" started early; he'd talk about "sending a message to a number to add a value to itself". It sounded like there were all these asynchronously running objects communicating. That was his original vision - every object a virtual CPU. But in reality, it was just a synchronous function call.

The funny thing is, we now do have a lot of systems that are async message-oriented. Mostly in Javascript, not Smalltalk. You send a one-way message to something, and maybe it calls you back later.