Ivan Sutherland wrote "Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System" as his 1963 thesis and later improved as shown in this demo.
YOUTUBE 6orsmFndx_o Published May 30, 2012.
This work was seminal in Human-Computer Interaction, Graphics and Graphical User Interfaces, Computer Aided Design, and constraint/object-oriented programming.
Remember that the TX-2 built in 1956 was room-sized and contained just 64K of 36-bit words.
.
I am struck by this opening dialog for the demo. Dr. Coons describes a collaboration between human and computer. I can feel Alan Kay's frustration echoing off the walls that we lost this spirit so very long ago.
"To learn about some of its recent work in improving the relationship between man and this important machine we talked with Professor Steven Coons, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and co-director of the computer aided design project."
"John, we're going to show you a man actually talking to a computer in a way far different than it's ever been possible to do before."
"Surely not with his voice?"
"No. He's going to be talking graphically. He's going to be drawing and the computer is going to understand his drawings and the man will be using a language—a graphical language that we call sketchpad—that started with Ivan Sutherland some years ago when he was busy working on his doctoral degree. And you will see a designer, effectively, solving a problem step by step and he will not at the outset know precisely what his problem is nor will he know exactly how to solve it but little by little he will begin to investigate ideas. And the computer and he will be in cooperation, in the fullest cooperation in this work."
"Well now how does this differ from the way the computer has been used in the past to solve problems?"
The conventional way, the old way of solving problems with a computer has been to understand the problem very very well indeed. And moreover to know at the very outset just exactly what steps are necessary to solve the problem. We saw the computer has been, in a sense, nothing but a very elaborate calculating machine. But now we're making the computer be more like a, almost like a human assistant. And the computer will seem to have some intelligence. It doesn't, really; only the intelligence that we put in it. But it will seem to have intelligence. In the old days to solve a problem it was necessary to be able to write out in detail on a typewriter or in punch card form all of the steps all of the ritual that it takes to solve a problem."
"Because the computer so literal-minded?"
"Because it's very literal-minded. If you, for example, in the old days made so much as one mistake of a comma in the wrong place or a decimal point that was omitted the entire program would hang up and wouldn't run but nowadays if you make a mistake you can correct it. As you'll see immediately and the computer is much more tolerant and much more flexible.