Adele Goldberg
Co-created Smalltalk and the modern GUI at Xerox PARC, and defined how the system would be taught.
Adele Goldberg was a central member of the Xerox PARC team that created Smalltalk and the modern graphical interface. She co-authored the defining Smalltalk-80 books and led much of the work that turned a research language into a complete, learnable object-oriented system — with the development environment, not just the language, treated as part of the design.
It was Goldberg who, the story goes, was reluctantly asked to demonstrate the PARC system to Apple's engineers — a moment that rippled outward into the Macintosh and beyond. As an educator and entrepreneur she kept pressing Kay's question of how computers might help people learn. She belongs to Alan Kay & Smalltalk.