Adele Goldberg

Adele Goldberg studied mathematics and information science before joining the Learning Research Group at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, a small team that had been given unusual freedom to imagine what computing might look like once machines were cheap and personal rather than shared and industrial. Working alongside Alan Kay and others, she helped design Smalltalk, one of the first fully object-oriented programming languages, and the graphical windows, icons and menus that made the experimental Xerox Alto computer navigable without typed commands.

In 1979 she was part of the team that showed this work, including the graphical interface and the mouse, to a visiting group from Apple that included Steve Jobs. She has said she argued against giving Apple as thorough a demonstration as Jobs pushed for, aware of how much unpublished research it revealed, but was overruled by Xerox management keen on a stock arrangement with Apple. Elements of what Apple's team saw that day fed directly into the Lisa and Macintosh computers that popularised the graphical desktop.

Goldberg later co-founded ParcPlace Systems to commercialise Smalltalk and served as president of the Association for Computing Machinery. She has spent much of her later career pushing computer science education toward broader access, and has spoken candidly about watching ideas she helped build become famous under someone else's name.