Do you remember the scene in Pirates of Silicon Valley where the team at Xerox PARC must give Steve Jobs a tour of their ground-breaking research? A red-headed woman very reluctantly shows Steve the team’s then bleeding-edge work. Take a minute to watch the clip, if you haven’t seen it (beginning around frame 3.14).

This scene is very loosely based on actual events¹, and the woman portrayed can refer to none other than Adele Goldberg.

Dr. Goldberg was one of the researchers responsible for the advancement of object-oriented programming concepts and for the development of the Smalltalk language. Smalltalk, the first fully object-oriented language, was used to prototype the features that we associate with modern GUIs—graphical menus, mouse clicks, browsers and windows. The end result of the PARC team’s research was enabling users with little technical knowledge to make simple changes on a microcomputer, such as changing directories, opening files and pasting text.

The research Goldberg and company were conducting wasn’t only making computing more friendly for users; it was also making computing more usable for programmers. At ParcPlace, which she founded, she helped develop tools for corporate customers who want to use OO concepts in their development.

Adele was president of the ACM from 1984 to 1986. Currently, she is the founder of Neometron, Inc.

1. http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele_Goldberg_(computer_scientist)
3. http://www.ddj.com/184405043

You can hear Adele talk about browsing, selecting text with a mouse and other innovations in computing in this video.