Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad (1962) looks like Illustrator!

Alan Kay presenting Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad, one of most influential programs in the history of graphical user interfaces. Sutherland developed Sketchpad in 1963. This video was extracted taken from a longer one in http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKe…


This video is a TV show made about the software Ivan Sutherland developed in his 1963 thesis at MIT’s Lincoln Labs, “Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System”, described as one of the most influential computer programs ever written. This work was seminal in Human-Computer Interaction, Graphics and Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), Computer Aided Design (CAD), and contraint/object-oriented programming. While watching this video, remember that the TX-2 computer (built circa 1958) on which the software ran was built from discrete transistors (not integrated circuits -it was room-sized) and contained just 64K of 36-bit words (~272k bytes).