Sketchpad III Demo [video] (1963)
Sutherland saw, very early, that a constraint system was the way to go. We went through generations of CAD systems and draw programs which didn't do constraints. Even today, most draw programs don't do constraints as well as Sketchpad.
Sketch mode in Autodesk Inventor does constraints very well, including difficult geometry problems like circles tangent to other circles. This is a solved problem today, but tends to be solved right only in the better CAD systems.
(If only the HTML people had thought in terms of constraints. Left edge of box B is coincident with right edge of box A. Right edge of box B is coincident with right edge of window. Left edge of box A is coincident with left edge of window. Top edge of box A and top edge of box B are collinear. Boxes A and B have equal width. That's the way to get two columns.
Unlike CSS layout, this concept can be extended beyond rectangular boxes; constraints with circles and splines are usually solveable.)
obligatory quote, for those who have not read it before
> 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?"
> Ivan replied: "Well, I didn't know it was hard."
Ah, SketchPad. You put http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html to shame.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TX-2, the machine SketchPad ran on, had 460KB of 36-bit memory, and it. ran. at. 400kHz - yes - 400k instructions per second.
The CAD system that introduced the idea of the GUI, clipboard, OOP, and so many other things, ran only a little faster than the masked-ROM calculators you can buy for a couple dollars at the store down the road nowadays. It's kind of depressing.
If you liked the OP video, you must watch https://archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987. It's only 46:29 long.
I really, REALLY want the SketchPad program. If I had a bunch of money tucked away I would easily dedicate a decade of my life to trying to track it down.
As an aside, I'm not quite sure how to refer to the amount of memory it has, particularly considering that the memory is 36-bit and not 8-bit. Wikipedia says it has 64KB; the video says (I quote) "460 K bytes".
References:
- I waxed philosophical about SketchPad a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13102757 (article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13097121)
Professor: "We're going to show you a man actually talking to a computer.." Interviewer: "Surely not with his voice."
More precisely, what's being demoed is Sketchpad III, which improved Sutherland's original 2d Sketchpad with 3d rendering capabilities. And Ivan Sutherland's not in the video.
Douglas Englebart's video is another classic video that took place in 1968:
Light pen's and chorded keyboards in the 1960's.