Adele Goldberg worked at the IBM office as a clerk in the summer of 1966 in the Installation Center. She used record machines for accounting and programmed a physical board that was similar to the telephone operator switchboard. The holes in the board were used for storage locations and registers. The programming process included running wires from register to register which helped them to transfer data. She enjoyed this and said, “Ah! Information bits are transferring from one place to another, and you’re manipulating it.” Once her summer of interning was over, she went back to The University of Michigan to finish her final semester of college. She realized there that the number of women in her math classes was much smaller than the number of men.
Adele Goldberg later worked at Xerox. She and her team were given 5 years to create whatever they wanted and after that, the company would take over their work. Goldberg described her co-workers as very intelligent and supportive, from diverse academic backgrounds, and she found her work environment to be comfortable. In 1977, she was doing a big project to teach Xerox management about software, it’s flexibility, and how software changes hardware. For more information, please visit this video.
She helped to develop Smalltalk which is a coding language. Goldberg and her team's inventions became the basis for graphically based user interfaces which replaced the command line systems of prior coding languages. Smalltalk has inspired coding languages that are used today.