[HN Gopher] Ivan Sutherland Sketchpad Demo 1963 [video]
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Ivan Sutherland Sketchpad Demo 1963 [video]
Author : fs_software
Score : 92 points
Date : 2025-12-02 23:13 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| Animats wrote:
| Sutherland figured out how graphic interaction ought to work,
| with the computer recognizing near points and connecting them.
| What we now call "snap". He had the key idea of CAD - you can
| draw with more accuracy if the computer helps.
|
| That demo is running on the MIT TX-0, a transistorized version of
| Whirlwind and the predecessor of the PDP-1. It was somewhat
| obsolete at that point, so projects like this could get time on
| it.
| dependency_2x wrote:
| He brushes over the zoom out, which I think was pretty
| impressive for a computer of this time. There is a lot of
| redrawing/recalculating going on there. Would be impressive on
| a 80s microcomputer.
| d-us-vb wrote:
| No, rendering to a vector display (hardware whose primitive
| operations are points and lines) is almost free for the kind
| of drawings he was rendering. Zoom is just one linear
| transformation on each point in the model, no different from
| panning the view.
| leoc wrote:
| I mean, the panning was pretty impressive at the time as
| well. In Sutherland's 1994 "Bay Area Computer History
| Perspectives" talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_cevebL
| O-A&list=PLKTTWvMgeg... he points out flickering or
| 'jumping' due to the processor burden of rescaling in a
| number of places in the Sketchpad demo video, including at
| 42:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_cevebLO-A&list=PLKT
| TWvMgeg... and at 50:10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_c
| evebLO-A&list=PLKTTWvMgeg... .
| leoc wrote:
| Sutherland started programming on the TX-0, which was widely
| accessible on the MIT campus, but Sketchpad was definitely done
| on the big gun, the TX-2, which was still inside Lincoln
| Laboratories. (Sutherland's uncle-in-law
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Getting helped get him into
| Lincoln Labs. See
| https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273819...
| .) There's an active TX-2 emulation project at the moment
| https://tx-2.github.io/ , which has the primary goal of getting
| Sketchpad running.
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| Constraints as well, you can hear him talking about them at
| 8:20, this is fundamental to CAD programs.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| The company I worked for in the early 80's was in the market
| for a CAD system, and they all had constraint systems in the
| UI, and showed them in the demos.
| Animats wrote:
| CAD people got this a long time ago, but, unfortunately,
| HTML people never did. Layout is a 2D constraint problem,
| but HTML/CSS approaches it as a procedural problem, partly
| because early browsers were so compute and bandwidth
| constrained.
| gaigalas wrote:
| Super excited about this kind of stuff. Sutherland, mother of all
| demos, Bret Victor, live fish, etc.
|
| However, going this route for real likely means multi-decade
| research and iteration.
|
| Demos are quick to make. Generalizing and turning it into real
| reliable software seems tremendously hard, and beyond just a
| shift in mindset.
|
| Fortunatelly, we now have vibe coding, so anyone can experience
| first-hand the frustration of trying to just shift your mindset
| and immediately reaching a metric ton of limitations in the very
| first iterations. It's a humbling experience that I recommend to
| anyone (go ahead and change the world with precision UI, just try
| it).
| gjvc wrote:
| you'll like this then
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
| victorbuilds wrote:
| At 5:38 he describes "gravity fields" that snap your cursor to
| lines and endpoints - letting you "be sloppy while drawing and
| get a precision drawing at the same time."
|
| Every design tool today (Figma, Illustrator, CAD) still uses this
| exact UX pattern. Sutherland nailed it 62 years ago with a light
| pen and an oscilloscope.
| leoc wrote:
| The first demonstrator here is Timothy E. Johnson, not Ivan
| Sutherland. Johnson did the "Sketchpad III" work extending
| Sketchpad into 3D which is demonstrated from 11:30
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6orsmFndx_o&t=690s . Then Larry
| Roberts appears to demonstrate his own work on hidden-line
| removal, which is shown from 14:42
| https://youtu.be/6orsmFndx_o?t=882 .
|
| See https://tx-2.github.io/videos#sketchpad for more video,
| including appearances by Sutherland himself.
| https://tx-2.github.io/ is an active effort to get Sketchpad
| running again on a new TX-2 emulator.
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