Who invented sketchpad

Among others on his thesis committee were Marvin Minsky and Steven Coons. Wesley Clark, then in charge of computer applications at Lincoln Laboratory, agreed to give him access to the TX By November, , Sutherland had the first version of Sketchpad working. This version, based on an internal project memorandum authored by Coons, could draw horizontal and vertical lines, and supported zooming of the display. Based on a suggestion from Shannon, it supported both line segments and arcs.

Sutherland also incorporated concepts developed by members of the Computer-Aided Design Project, including plex programming a precursor to modern object-oriented programming , the Algorithmic Theory of Language, the Theory of Operators, and the Bootstrap Picture Language.

This version of Sketchpad also included a constraint solver developed by Lawrence Roberts. Sutherland, like many other people who have accomplished great things, stood on the shoulders of giants.

Clark had designed the TX-2, a computer perfectly suited to creating an interactive drawing program. Engineers at Lincoln Laboratory had optimized the design of light pens. Shannon had created information theory. Roberts had contributed solver technology. But it was Ross and Coons who provided Sutherland with many of the conceptual underpinnings that helped make Sketchpad really stand out. They had a much larger vision for Computer-Aided Design, but Sketchpad was an excellent proof of concept, and reflected well on them.

In particular, the widely distributed movies of Sketchpad in operation have had a profound influence on the whole field of computer graphics. The lessons of Sketchpad Sutherland never wanted to create a computer-aided design system.

He wanted to create a computer drawing system. That such a system could be used for drafting, or as a tool for engineering design was of secondary importance to him. Taking it further would have been more like work than fun as many CAD developers have discovered over the last 50 years.

In the process of creating Sketchpad, Sutherland discovered that the most challenging impediment to making such a system practical was in the performance of its display system. In , he co-founded Evans and Sutherland, and tackled that problem. Sutherland created two versions of Sketchpad: one that did drafting, and one that did design. Even today, people who see the movies of the design version of Sketchpad are blown away by its capability.

Yet, what capabilities do they look for when they go to buy 2D CAD software? Over time, a number of companies have developed Sketchpad-like 2D design programs featuring constrained sketching. It only got constraint capabilities in —some 47 years after Sketchpad had them. The place where Sketchpad-like capability has found acceptance is in 3D feature-based modeling. At least, in capability. Where they fail in comparison to Sketchpad is in extensibility.

Sketchpad was an innovative system developed in by Ivan Sutherland as part of his PhD thesis. It is a tribute to Sketchpad's uniqueness that it defined a GUI Graphical User Interface more than 20 years before the term was first used.

The computer was very advanced for its time and had kb main memory, an 8Mb magnetic tape storage device, a 7 inch x monitor, a light pen and a button box. As with most computers of that era, programs were written in macro-assembler, punched onto paper tape and fed into the computer's paper tape reader. Ada Lovelace WItC? Lord Kelvin WItC? Vannevar Bush WItC? Alan Turing WItC? Tommy Flowers WItC? Thomas Watson Jr. Ivan Sutherland WItC?

John G. Operators could not only draw lines with the program, but with the flip of a switch, convert rough drawings into neat looking figures and shapes. Drawn figures could also be stored in memory, copied, moved, rotated, zoomed in and out on and even resized while retaining their basic properties of width, length, and angles as well as any hidden lines. If the user decided to make a change to a drawing, they could make the same change to any existing copies of the drawing as well.

Although Sketchpad was not an actual computer-aided design program, it was a working proof-of-concept that humans could communicate and interact directly with computers. Prior to this time, computers were programmed to perform specific functions by typing in lengthy written statements consisting of letters and numbers. Second, few commercial computers at that time had the computing capacity to run Sketchpad.