Adele Goldberg

From mathematics to learning systems

Goldberg was born in Cleveland in 1945 and studied mathematics at the University of Michigan. She completed a PhD in information science at the University of Chicago in 1973. Her doctoral work concerned computer-assisted instruction.

The IEEE oral-history overview places her move to Xerox PARC in the summer of that year. It also follows a continuing interest in learning, rather than treating education as a late departure from programming-language research.

Sources for this section: [1] · [2]

Smalltalk as a shared working environment

At PARC, Goldberg worked with Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls on Smalltalk. Her contributions included developing and explaining the programming environment and exploring how people, including children, could use it to build models.

Goldberg and David Robson’s 1983 book distinguishes an object, the messages it understands and the methods through which it responds. That vocabulary makes a system’s organization visible to a reader as well as to a programmer.

The book is a joint publication. Clear documentation and the design of usable tools are substantial contributions in their own right; they need not be inflated into a claim that one author invented every graphical-interface idea.

Sources for this section: [1] · [3]

Taking a laboratory system outside the laboratory

Goldberg helped introduce Smalltalk to a wider audience through books and other publications. She served as ACM president from 1984 to 1986. She shared the 1987 ACM Software System Award with Ingalls and Kay.

In 1988 she cofounded ParcPlace Systems, which developed Smalltalk-based tools. She served as a company leader and later established a consultancy after leaving ParcPlace. The IEEE interview records the challenges of moving from a laboratory setting into a software business.

Sources for this section: [1] · [2] · [4]

Education remained part of the work

Her later activities included designing systems for online courses and support for secondary-school mathematics and science. The Computer History Museum also preserves working material from her research and publishing career.

The career connects language, explanation, training and distribution. A programming system becomes useful through all four, and examining them together gives a fuller account than a story confined to a famous demonstration for another computer company.

Sources for this section: [2]