Sketchpad
More info
- Creator
- Ivan Sutherland
- Released
- 1963
- Type
- Drawing program
- Machine
- MIT TX-2
Ivan Sutherland's 1963 doctoral thesis: a drawing program that invented computer graphics and the idea of pointing at what you are working on.
On MIT's TX-2, Sutherland could draw directly on the display with a light pen. The genuinely new part was not the line drawing but the constraints: you could state that two lines must stay parallel, or that a corner must remain attached to another. The program then solved the constraints and adjusted the figure, making it an early ancestor of both CAD and parametric design.
Sketchpad also had a notion of master drawings and instances of them, an idea pointing straight at classes and objects. The thesis is still read, and Alan Kay has described it as one of the texts that shaped his whole view of what a computer is for.