History of generics in programming languages
The theory of generic types (parametric polymorphism) is by Hindley (1968) and Milner (1977).
First programming language with parametric polymorphism is ML (1979); then Miranda, Haskell, Clean, …
First object-oriented language with generics is Eiffel (1991).

Generics in Java
• PolyJ (Myers, Bank, Liskov; 1997): Type parameters can be instantiated by reference types and primitive types; requires an extended JVM.
• Generic Java (Bracha, Odersky, Stoutamire, Wadler 1998): Became Java 5.0 generics (plus wildcards, due to researchers at Aarhus University); runs on standard JVM.
• NextGen (Cartwright, Steele; 1998): Type parameters can be instantiated by reference types, not primitive types; runs on standard JVM

Generics in C#
• Generic C# and new Generic Common Language Runtime (Kennedy and Syme, Microsoft Research Cambridge UK, 2001).
• In November 2002, Microsoft announced generics for next version of C#; Redmond had been convinced …
• In August 2003, first alpha version of .Net Common Language Infrastructure with generics released.

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