Interface Studies
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 12 months, 2016–2025
19:20 · 136K views · May 30, 2012
A TV show about Ivan Sutherland's 1963 MIT thesis software Sketchpad, which ran on the TX-2 computer. It shows a light pen drawing, constraints, snapping, scaling and object-style graphics, foundations of GUIs and CAD.
HN returns to it as a striking demonstration that core GUI, CAD and constraint-programming ideas existed in the 1960s.
13 comments from Hacker News
TL;DR: If you share the sentiment of the parent commentator you may find this wall of text interesting. You might be interested in Alan Kay's "Doing with Images Makes Symbols Pt 1", [LINK] (46:29). This video features excerpts from Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad demo ( [LINK] , 10:34; this video , 19:19) and Douglas Englebart's seminal demonstration ( [LINK] , 34:45). I recommend watching all the videos in full to get a proper sense of context (Alan Kay's excerpts from Douglas's demonstration particularly don't include the bits that explain how the workstation's camera system works, which is important; also, the right audio channel in the Alan Kay video unfortunately seems to be dead, while the other videos are much better). Highlights from Alan Kay's video include (in hi..low precedence) info about the Sketchpad's CPU, which you might want to listen to twice so you don't mishear (8:58), some really depressing acknowledgements (from Alan Kay himself) that Sketchpad was a never-reproduced gem even in the 80s (8:33), Ivan's (quoted) remarks on the features of the Sketchpad system (7:58), and acknowledgement about the lack of ease of use of light pens (7:12). I consider the above videos to be my own personal pinnacle, what I look up to when I think about good computer design. Some may find them depressing for the reasons you've outlined. It's sad that this obscure niche of computing doesn't lend itself to being very actionable in this day and age. There's definitely no comparison in t
Demo of Ivan Sutherland's 1963 Sketchpad: this video It was a drawing app with the following features: Snap to object ("This allows me to be sloppy while I'm drawing and get a precision drawing at the same time"), connected vectors, arcs, alignment with other objects, copying, multiple "files," scaling ("It scales approximately 2 miles in size"), 3D, etc etc It blows me away that this kind of UI was even conceived in the 1960s. It feels like there was a dark ages middle period after then until quite recently.
I remember reading an article on Source Code In Database back in the early 2000s, and it's been knocking around my brain ever since as something I ponder every couple of years. I just can't shake the feeling that there's the gem of a future paradigm where everyone wonders "why we didn't always do it that way?", but then every time I try to follow those thoughts through to a conclusion, it always feels like it'd just be re-implementing Smalltalk, and then the question is "why isn't Smalltalk more popular?" That said, there's a lot to be said for revisiting old ideas. There was so much interesting research done in the 60s and 70s in all sorts of random directions, maybe because at that time there were no precedents or expectations for how things should be done. There are so many untapped resources here, it's crazy. Every now and then I re-watch "The Mother of All Demos" [1] from 1968 where Douglas Englebert demonstrates some of the research at Stanford or the Sketchpad Demo [2] from 1963 where Ivan Sutherland is presenting a GUI-based CAD system. Fortunately, these ideas have now been picked up again, but to me it's interesting to note just how long a time lapsed between these ideas and becoming mainstream. Some of it is obviously the cost as the state-of-the-art research machines were massively more powerful than the home computers even 2 decades later, but I'm sure there were a lot of great ideas that have just been forgotten. Part of the problem, I think, is that we have fou
I don't know if it's selection/survivor bias, but every time I watch a video about computers from the 60s and 70s, I am amazed how spot on they are with the trajectory of the technology. Take this CAD demo from MIT back in 1963 showing features that I commonly use today: this video Then the 80s and 90s rolled in, the concept is computers that entered the mainstream. Imagination got too wild with movies like Electric Dreams (1984). Videos like this make me think that our predictions of AI super intelligence are probably pretty accurate. But just like this machine, in actuality it may look different.
Here are 2 that he often brings up: Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad demo - Object oriented graphics using a constraint based system ( this video ) Douglas Englebart's demo - too many innovations to list, but includes real time collaboration (he demoed in a convention center while the system ran 30 miles away in his lab, connected by a leased line operating at 1200 baud!). People think he just invented the mouse, but the overarching theme in his work was augmenting human capabilities... [LINK]