
Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communication system (1963) - sebastianconcpt
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.10.4290&rep=rep1&type=pdf
======
coob
Here's a 2 part video of Sutherland demonstrating SketchPad:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKM3CmRqK2o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKM3CmRqK2o)

My favourite Sutherland quote:

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?” Sutherland replied, “Well, I
didn't know it was hard.” --
[http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987](http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987)

~~~
hga
And very few people had access to resources like the TX-2, the 2nd generation
of the transistorized Whirlwind, the computer that defined how we build them
to this day.

With a whopping 256 KiB of memory (64 Ki of 36 bit words); not many systems
could afford that much memory in the '60s. Part of the MIT style of doing
things is to have a large uniform address space, e.g. later the AI Lab got
DARPA to fund a 1 MiB memory bank for their first generation KA PDP-10, that's
one full address space, 18 bits of 36 bit words (a cons cell was a word
treating each 18 bit half as a pointer). I was told that was considered to be
beyond the state of the art back then, and this account strongly supports
that:
[http://ljkrakauer.com/LJK/60s/moby.htm](http://ljkrakauer.com/LJK/60s/moby.htm)
And, yeah, I can see the 4 extra bits per word theoretically available in case
one plane failed inspiring Greenblatt, "the father of the Lisp Machine" and
company to do a tagged architecture. (When I showed up in 1979, I was told
MACLISP for the PDP-10/Decsystem-20 used the "big bag of pages" GC method,
every page had only one type of object in it; no cache except on KL
processors, so originally no locality penalty.)

I suspect Smalltalk has a larger object size granularity than Lisp in part
because it was developed to run on systems with multiple banks of 64 K of 16
bit memory (up to 4; the Xerox Alto). The cost of bank switching is lower the
larger the object to be addressed or swapped in (note, this is my personal
theory, I have nothing to back it up except my study of these systems in the
early '80s and intuition).

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Its incredible to me that the TX-2 was designed by Wesley Clark who was born
in the 20's. Imagine all the advances he not only saw but helped make happen.
It must also have been frustrating to be at the forefront of this technology
and understand how it could be used by everyday people and knowing that if
that day ever comes it will be decades away.

Imagine, say, starting a 3d printing company today and only having it become a
ubiquitous household item in 2050, knowing the potential and practical use
they have today.

The TX-2 was a Navy purchase. I also wonder how much of modernity is tied
directly to the US's rise as a super-power post WWII. You don't build things
like these unless you have worries about another world war breaking out.

~~~
DonHopkins
With virtual reality smartphones strapped to our faces running Alien Makeout
Simulator [1], we're practically living in PKD's novel, "The Zap Gun" [2]!

This novel is set in a then-future 2004. There is still a (theoretical) Cold
War between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its
allies. At the elite governmental level, however, both "sides" have secretly
come to an agreement. They have decided that, instead of continuing the
ecologically and economically crippling nuclear and conventional arms race,
they will pretend to be constantly developing new weapons, which are then
"plowshared." This means that these items are transformed into novel but
baroque consumer products. Most of these weapon designers are mediums, who
create their new designs in trance states. Design of weapons are extracted
telepathically from a motion comic book, The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan,
created by mad Italian artist Oral Giacomini.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS9LPwSZI0s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS9LPwSZI0s)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zap_Gun](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zap_Gun)

------
nfmangano
It was such an amazing system and it's unbelievable that this was published in
1963. Too bad it took more than 3 decades before it made it into people's
homes.

Anyone finding this interesting might find Bill Buxton's timeline of devices
interesting too:
[http://www.billbuxton.com/inputTimeline.html](http://www.billbuxton.com/inputTimeline.html)

~~~
hga
A question of $$$. See my above comment about the _huge_ for the time memory
size of the TX-2. Even the 7094 that CTSS was build on (inspiring later
Multics and then UNIX(TM)) only had 2 banks of memory totaling that size,
roughly half for the kernel and half for a single user program at a time.

You couldn't even begin to think about until, say, Intel started mass
producing their groundbreaking first DRAM chip, which had a whopping 1024 bits
of memory. And, hey, it was only 21 years until Apple shipped the first
Macintosh ... with 128 KiB of DRAM and 64 KiB of ROM, 3/4ths of the TX-02's
single memory bank....

------
ccozan
Also quite interesting, the thesis supervisor is/was Claude E. Shannon! THE
Shannon of famous information theory.

------
mkrdouble
Perhaps it's just my connection, but this link loaded the PDF for me:
[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-
TR-574.pdf](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf)

------
cubano
_Sutherland’s original aim was to make computers accessible to new classes of
user (artists and draughtsmen among others), while retaining the powers of
abstraction that are critical to programmers_

If that was his original aim, I think we can safely agree that he achieved
this goal beyond his wildest expectations.

His vision has become the goto paradigm for computing in the late 20th and
early 21st centuries, although the rise of mobile computing is changing the
basic UI trajectory.

------
gearhart
If anybody else read this and, like me, immediately wanted an implementation
of it to play with, the closest I could find was a part-implemented cljs
version here:
[https://github.com/asolove/Sketchpad](https://github.com/asolove/Sketchpad)

Does anyone know of a fully implemented graphical editor that supports
constraint satisfaction like this?

~~~
zephod
When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge we built one during 2006 in a team of
six people working under Alan Blackwell (the preface-author of the paper
linked above). Now it appears on HN and I cannot find the source code anywhere
:-|

~~~
Animats
If there's an implementation around, someone should convert it to a browser
application. More people need to see the original Sketchpad. It was better
than most of its successors.

------
sebastianconcpt
The best thing about seeing old material is that it helps you to filter out
old technology but recycle the best essence on the intention of the designs
with modern resources.

------
paulus_magnus
If you allow a little bit of shameless self-promotion/

I (co) made a related app (android + html5) \- draw / handwrite (vector data
format) \- ability to synchronously co-draw in real-time \- docs stored in the
cloud

we're not fully ready for beta, but here goes [http://write-
live.com/](http://write-live.com/)

------
sv3nss0n
please indicate its year (2003) in the title.

~~~
dang
Sutherland's dissertation is from 1963. The 2003 here seems to apply only to
the introduction.

