What was the Historical Precursor for .NET Attributes?

Question

What languages or platforms influenced the .NET 1.0 Team to build-in the concept of Attributes from the very start? Was this an Aspect-Oriented thing? Serialization? or some

Answer 1

I don't know if this is the originator, but they have been around in COM and MIDL for a long time. There weren't user-defined ones, but you had to attribute methods, types, etc, etc to make specific claims about the contracts in MIDL.