... hmm, just looked it up. According to some sites on the web, TDD was created by Kent Beck as apart of Extreme Programming in the 90's and automated testing is a big part of TDD. Having lived through that era, thinking back, would say that TDD did help to popularize automated testing. It made us realize that focusing a ton on writing tests had a lot of benefits (and yeah, most of us didn't do the test first development part).

But this is kind of splitting hairs on what TDD is, not too important.