1980
Adele Goldberg co-releases Smalltalk-80
Adele Goldberg and the Xerox PARC team released SmalltalkAn object-oriented language and environment from Xerox PARC — pioneered GUIs and live programming.-80 in 1980 — pioneering GUIGraphical user interface — windows, icons, and pointers instead of typed commands.s, OOPObject-oriented programming — organizing code around objects that combine data and behavior., and live programming environments.
What it was for
SmalltalkAn object-oriented language and environment from Xerox PARC — pioneered GUIs and live programming. influenced Objective-CA language combining C with Smalltalk-style object messaging — used for macOS and iOS before Swift., JavaA portable language running on the JVM — dominant in enterprise servers, Android, and big data., RubyA dynamic language emphasizing developer happiness — Rails made it the default for web startups in the 2000s., and every IDEIntegrated development environment — an editor with debugging, build tools, and project management built in. with a REPLRead-eval-print loop — an interactive shell that runs code as you type it. or object browser. Goldberg famously showed Steve Jobs the Xerox GUIGraphical user interface — windows, icons, and pointers instead of typed commands. concepts that shaped the Macintosh.
People
- Adele Goldberg — co creator
Why it's here
SmalltalkAn object-oriented language and environment from Xerox PARC — pioneered GUIs and live programming.-80 defined modern OOPObject-oriented programming — organizing code around objects that combine data and behavior. and interactive development environments.
Why it mattered
It proved objects and GUIGraphical user interface — windows, icons, and pointers instead of typed commands.s belonged together on personal computers.
What it solved
Programming was batch processingRunning many jobs sequentially without interactive input — how early mainframes processed work overnight.-oriented without visual feedback or object metaphors.
Media
ImageAdele Goldberg (computer scientist)Terry Hancock, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons