Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communication system (1963) | Hacker News Reader

Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communication system (1963)

citeseerx.ist.psu.edu

Here's a 2 part video of Sutherland demonstrating SketchPad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKM3CmRqK2o

My favourite Sutherland quote:

When asked, “How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object oriented software system, all in one year?” Sutherland replied, “Well, I didn't know it was hard.” -- http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987

And very few people had access to resources like the TX-2, the 2nd generation of the transistorized Whirlwind, the computer that defined how we build them to this day.

With a whopping 256 KiB of memory (64 Ki of 36 bit words); not many systems could afford that much memory in the '60s. Part of the MIT style of doing things is to have a large uniform address space, e.g. later the AI Lab got DARPA to fund a 1 MiB memory bank for their first generation KA PDP-10, that's one full address space, 18 bits of 36 bit words (a cons cell was a word treating each 18 bit half as a pointer). I was told that was considered to be beyond the state of the art back then, and this account strongly supports that: http://ljkrakauer.com/LJK/60s/moby.htm And, yeah, I can see the 4 extra bits per word theoretically available in case one plane failed inspiring Greenblatt, "the father of the Lisp Machine" and company to do a tagged architecture. (When I showed up in 1979, I was told MACLISP for the PDP-10/Decsystem-20 used the "big bag of pages" GC method, every page had only one type of object in it; no cache except on KL processors, so originally no locality penalty.)

I suspect Smalltalk has a larger object size granularity than Lisp in part because it was developed to run on systems with multiple banks of 64 K of 16 bit memory (up to 4; the Xerox Alto). The cost of bank switching is lower the larger the object to be addressed or swapped in (note, this is my personal theory, I have nothing to back it up except my study of these systems in the early '80s and intuition).

Oh yeah -- BIBOP Lisp!

It don't mean a thing if it ain't goes beyond swing?

Its incredible to me that the TX-2 was designed by Wesley Clark who was born in the 20's. Imagine all the advances he not only saw but helped make happen. It must also have been frustrating to be at the forefront of this technology and understand how it could be used by everyday people and knowing that if that day ever comes it will be decades away.

Imagine, say, starting a 3d printing company today and only having it become a ubiquitous household item in 2050, knowing the potential and practical use they have today.

The TX-2 was a Navy purchase. I also wonder how much of modernity is tied directly to the US's rise as a super-power post WWII. You don't build things like these unless you have worries about another world war breaking out.

With virtual reality smartphones strapped to our faces running Alien Makeout Simulator [1], we're practically living in PKD's novel, "The Zap Gun" [2]!

This novel is set in a then-future 2004. There is still a (theoretical) Cold War between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. At the elite governmental level, however, both "sides" have secretly come to an agreement. They have decided that, instead of continuing the ecologically and economically crippling nuclear and conventional arms race, they will pretend to be constantly developing new weapons, which are then "plowshared." This means that these items are transformed into novel but baroque consumer products. Most of these weapon designers are mediums, who create their new designs in trance states. Design of weapons are extracted telepathically from a motion comic book, The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan, created by mad Italian artist Oral Giacomini.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS9LPwSZI0s

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zap_Gun

Fantastic material! thanks for sharing this one!

It was such an amazing system and it's unbelievable that this was published in 1963. Too bad it took more than 3 decades before it made it into people's homes.

Anyone finding this interesting might find Bill Buxton's timeline of devices interesting too: http://www.billbuxton.com/inputTimeline.html

A question of $$$. See my above comment about the huge for the time memory size of the TX-2. Even the 7094 that CTSS was build on (inspiring later Multics and then UNIX(TM)) only had 2 banks of memory totaling that size, roughly half for the kernel and half for a single user program at a time.

You couldn't even begin to think about until, say, Intel started mass producing their groundbreaking first DRAM chip, which had a whopping 1024 bits of memory. And, hey, it was only 21 years until Apple shipped the first Macintosh ... with 128 KiB of DRAM and 64 KiB of ROM, 3/4ths of the TX-02's single memory bank....

Also quite interesting, the thesis supervisor is/was Claude E. Shannon! THE Shannon of famous information theory.

Perhaps it's just my connection, but this link loaded the PDF for me: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf

Sutherland’s original aim was to make computers accessible to new classes of user (artists and draughtsmen among others), while retaining the powers of abstraction that are critical to programmers

If that was his original aim, I think we can safely agree that he achieved this goal beyond his wildest expectations.

His vision has become the goto paradigm for computing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, although the rise of mobile computing is changing the basic UI trajectory.

If anybody else read this and, like me, immediately wanted an implementation of it to play with, the closest I could find was a part-implemented cljs version here: https://github.com/asolove/Sketchpad

Does anyone know of a fully implemented graphical editor that supports constraint satisfaction like this?

When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge we built one during 2006 in a team of six people working under Alan Blackwell (the preface-author of the paper linked above). Now it appears on HN and I cannot find the source code anywhere :-|

If there's an implementation around, someone should convert it to a browser application. More people need to see the original Sketchpad. It was better than most of its successors.

The Geometers Sketchpad was inspired and named after Sutherland's work, and has been around for quite a while. I remember it blowing my mind blown in the early 90's, running on the Mac.

If it hasn't already been done, it would make a lot of sense to port it to JavaScript so it runs nicely in the browser.

http://www.dynamicgeometry.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geometer%27s_Sketchpad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interactive_geometry_so...

The best thing about seeing old material is that it helps you to filter out old technology but recycle the best essence on the intention of the designs with modern resources.

If you allow a little bit of shameless self-promotion/

I (co) made a related app (android + html5) - draw / handwrite (vector data format) - ability to synchronously co-draw in real-time - docs stored in the cloud

we're not fully ready for beta, but here goes http://write-live.com/

please indicate its year (2003) in the title.

Sutherland's dissertation is from 1963. The 2003 here seems to apply only to the introduction.

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