Sketchpad

Sketchpad is a program that originated in 1962 as part of Ivan Sutherland's doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In the times of the late punch card computers, it represented a first step in the direction of a graphic interface and CAD , already used an early tube screen and the newly invented light pen . The application ran on a heavily rebuilt Lincoln TX-2 computer, which was dismantled after the work was finished.

The program already showed the first object-oriented approaches: When the central drawing was changed, the other, derived drawings also changed.

There was still a long way to go before the technology was used in the CAD area, for example in Konrad Zuse's early plotter applications or in the interface area ( Xerox , Macintosh , PC / GEOS , Windows , KDE , GNOME ). One of the first practical applications of the light pen and tube umbrella combination was air surveillance as part of the North American SAGE - NORAD program.

Web links

Video about the program
Müller-Prove, Matthias " Graphical User Interface of Sketchpad "

credentials

^ Ivan Edward Sutherland: Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communications system . In: Technical Report 296, MIT Lincoln Laboratories . 1963 ( annotated version, 2003 [PDF; 4.1 MB ]).

[Sutherland63-1] Ivan Edward Sutherland: Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communications system . In: Technical Report 296, MIT Lincoln Laboratories . 1963 ( annotated version, 2003 [PDF; 4.1 MB ]).