The conceptual framework for Environmental Acquisition was developed by Joseph Gil and David H. Lorenz in the Faculty of Computer Science at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and part of Lorenz's Ph.D Thesis. Acquisition was first presented at OOPSLA '96.
David Ascher was the first to implement a mechanism in Python close to Acquisition, called Subscription. Ascher implemented a variant of the original proposal using an object metaclass hook, and so he used a different name to avoid misunderstandings.