Adele Goldberg and Smalltalk

Abstract

Adele Goldberg turned Smalltalk, Alan Kay’s research language at Xerox PARC, into a system that people outside the lab could use. She joined PARC in 1973, co-built the Smalltalk-80 system, and in 1977 co-authored with Kay Personal Dynamic Media, which described something very like a tablet computer. She then led the books and licensing that took object-oriented programming and the windowed user interface out of Xerox. In December 1979 she was ordered to demonstrate Smalltalk to Steve Jobs, refused (telling her bosses they were about to give away “the kitchen sink”), and was overruled. She was ACM president from 1984 to 1986, only the second woman in the office, and founded ParcPlace Systems to sell the environment her team had built. ParcPlace lost to Java, but classes and message passing, overlapping windows, and the integrated development environment became standard.

Adele Goldberg at PyCon, 2007. Image: Terry Hancock, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

From Theorem Provers to PARC

Adele Goldberg (born July 22, 1945, in Cleveland, Ohio, raised in Chicago) studied mathematics at the University of Michigan (B.S. 1967), then information science at the University of Chicago (Ph.D. 1973), with a dissertation on computer-assisted instruction. In 1973 she joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (see The Xerox PARC Revolution), where Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group worked from the idea that children, not data-processing departments, were the right first users of personal computers, and that a flexible programming environment was what they needed.

Goldberg ran the group’s experiments with children and helped teach Smalltalk to Palo Alto schoolchildren. After Kay left, she became manager of the System Concepts Laboratory. In 1977 she and Kay published Personal Dynamic Media, which set out the Dynabook idea in prose: a notebook-sized personal computer for reading, writing, drawing, composing music, and running simulations. A reader today would call it a tablet.

Smalltalk-80

Inside PARC, Smalltalk and the hardware around it accumulated the furniture of modern computing: overlapping windows, pop-up menus, the bitmapped display treated as a canvas, an environment where the debugger, browser, and editor were live objects in the same world, an early model for every later IDE. But through the 1970s, all of it was visible only inside Xerox.

Goldberg led the project to change that. The Smalltalk-80 release (1980–1983) was as much publishing as programming: with David Robson she wrote Smalltalk-80: The Language and Its Implementation (1983), the “Blue Book,” whose precise virtual-machine specification let outsiders build their own implementations, followed by companion volumes documenting the interactive environment. Tapes went to review teams at DEC, HP, Apple, and Tektronix. Objective-C began as a Smalltalk-inspired C extension (the lineage that runs to the iPhone; see Swift and the Post-Objective-C Era); Java, Python, and Ruby absorbed its object model; design patterns, refactoring tools, unit testing (Kent Beck’s SUnit, parent of JUnit), and extreme programming all grew up in Smalltalk before migrating everywhere else.

The Demo

In December 1979, Steve Jobs negotiated access to PARC as part of a deal letting Xerox invest in pre-IPO Apple. When the order came down to show Apple’s team Smalltalk, Goldberg (by her own delighted retelling) refused, arguing to Xerox management that they were about to hand a competitor “the kitchen sink”: the crown jewels of a decade of research, for nothing. She was overruled by executives who, as she put it, had no idea what they were giving away; she fetched the demo disk herself, furious. Dan Ingalls drove the demo; Jobs later said he was so dazzled by the GUI that he barely registered the other two things he was shown, object-oriented programming and networked computing. The Lisa and Macintosh followed; Xerox’s own products did not (see Fun Fact: the Xerox Star’s price). Her protest is now the standard example of Xerox fumbling the future. She added that being right changed nothing, because the people deciding could not judge what they owned.

President, Founder, CEO

Goldberg was president of the ACM from 1984 to 1986, only the second woman in the role after Jean Sammet, while still running her PARC lab. In 1987 she shared the ACM Software System Award with Kay and Dan Ingalls for Smalltalk. In 1988 she co-founded ParcPlace Systems, with Xerox’s blessing and an equity stake, and served as its CEO and chair. ParcPlace sold Smalltalk-80 as ObjectWorks and VisualWorks, a cross-platform, JIT-compiled environment that found loyal users in finance and telecom for modeling complex systems. Her later ventures (Neometron, Bullitics) and board work went back to education and process knowledge. She became an ACM Fellow in 1994 and a Computer History Museum Fellow in 2022. See Women in Computing for the larger story she belongs to.

⚠️ Dead End: Commercial Smalltalk

By the early 1990s Smalltalk looked like the future of enterprise software: IBM backed it, analysts projected it would overtake C++, and ParcPlace was the leading vendor. By 2000 the commercial market was a husk. Per-developer licenses cost thousands of dollars just as free software was becoming the default. The image-based deployment model, in which an application lives inside a Smalltalk memory snapshot, baffled IT departments used to files and linkers. Vendors fragmented, and the 1995 ParcPlace–Digitalk merger of the two main rivals destroyed value instead of consolidating it. Above all there was Java: free, C-like in syntax, marketed with all of Sun’s resources, and arriving in 1995 with the web behind it (see The JVM and Java Ecosystem). Java’s HotSpot VM was built by engineers from the Smalltalk world, so the losing language supplied the engine of the winner. Open-source descendants (Squeak, by Kay and Ingalls themselves, and Pharo) keep the environment alive. Live debugging, refactoring tools, unit-test frameworks, and the object model of most mainstream languages trace back to it.

Fun Fact

The Blue Book printed the complete specification of the Smalltalk-80 virtual machine, bytecodes and all, in a paperback sold in bookstores. For a commercial technology this was almost unheard of; it amounted to open-sourcing the design before the term existed. Language implementers learned how to build a VM from it, among them the authors of the Java and JavaScript engines.