7 ms·

Sketchpad III Demo [video] (1963)

70 points by ShaneWilton 10y ago

riffraff 10y ago
obligatory quote, for those who have not read it before > 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?" > Ivan replied: "Well, I didn't know it was hard."
melling 10y ago
Douglas Englebart's video is another classic video that took place in 1968: https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY Light pen's and chorded keyboards in the 1960's.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
pliptvo 10y ago
More precisely, what's being demoed is Sketchpad III, which improved Sutherland's original 2d Sketchpad with 3d rendering capabilities. And Ivan Sutherland's not in the video.
- dang 10y ago
  Ok, we updated the title above to reflect that. I confess I thought it was Ivan :(
Animats 10y ago
Sutherland saw, very early, that a constraint system was the way to go. We went through generations of CAD systems and draw programs which didn't do constraints. Even today, most draw programs don't do constraints as well as Sketchpad. Sketch mode in Autodesk Inventor does constraints very well, including difficult geometry problems like circles tangent to other circles. This is a solved problem today, but tends to be solved right only in the better CAD systems. (If only the HTML people had thought in terms of constraints. Left edge of box B is coincident with right edge of box A. Right edge of box B is coincident with right edge of window. Left edge of box A is coincident with left edge of window. Top edge of box A and top edge of box B are collinear. Boxes A and B have equal width. That's the way to get two columns. Unlike CSS layout, this concept can be extended beyond rectangular boxes; constraints with circles and splines are usually solveable.)
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  Last time I rewatched this video I tried to start researching the idea of constraints but couldn't find a good starting point. Any recommendations?
  - Animats 10y ago
    https://www.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/papers/cmh/Basic2Dconstraints.pdf https://www.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/papers/cmh/Basic2Dconstrain...
- melloclello 10y ago
  As I remember, an early CSS proposal included the Cassowary constraints solver engine, but they decided not to go with it because either a fast implementation didn't exist at the time, or they were worried users wouldn't find the system intuitive?
  - azeirah 10y ago
    I remember that the Cassowary constraint system was implemented in Apple's app development framework, and people reporting that it was hell to work with after building anything beyond minimal complexity. Also, there is an actual GSS implementation by thegrid.io https://gridstylesheets.org/ https://gridstylesheets.org/
    - GuiA 10y ago
      To be fair, the blame isn't on the Cassowary approach, but Xcode's god awful Interface Builder UI.
    - Sidnicious 10y ago
      I've worked with Auto Layout a bit. - The GUI built into Xcode is usable once you learn its quirks (e.g. how to swap the relationship in a constraint so that it doesn't say that the right edge of some button needs to be -5pt from the left edge of the button next to it). - The ObjC/Swift API is bad. - It handles RTL languages excellently: by default, constraints are expressed in terms of leading/trailing edges, but can be literal left/right if you want. - It deals poorly with adding and removing views from a hierarchy: removing a view discards all of its constraints, so you need to have logic to reestablish them. Unfortunately, there are horror stories about performance tanking with an OS update or taking on exponential properties, like this one which lead the team to develop a non-constraint-based layout framework: https://realm.io/news/slug-nick-snyder-layoutkit/ https://realm.io/news/slug-nick-snyder-layoutkit/ It leads me to wonder if unpredictable performance is a limitation of constraint solving… or at least to be cautious with current implementations. Maybe an API that only makes known-fast relationships possible would help.
az123zaz 10y ago
Professor: "We're going to show you a man actually talking to a computer.." Interviewer: "Surely not with his voice."
- hotcrossbun 10y ago
  The chat with the professor is one of my favourite parts. Paraphrasing.....At the start he may not know what the problem is, but through interaction and response, he and the computer will work it out together. Totally nails interactive design, and what software development is, and yet often still fails to be
i336_ 10y ago
Ah, SketchPad. You put http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html to shame. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TX-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TX-2, the machine SketchPad ran on, had 460KB of 36-bit memory, and it. ran. at. 400kHz - yes - 400k instructions per second. The CAD system that introduced the idea of the GUI, clipboard, OOP, and so many other things, ran only a little faster than the masked-ROM calculators you can buy for a couple dollars at the store down the road nowadays. It's kind of depressing. If you liked the OP video, you must watch https://archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987 https://archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987. It's only 46:29 long. I really, REALLY want the SketchPad program. If I had a bunch of money tucked away I would easily dedicate a decade of my life to trying to track it down. As an aside, I'm not quite sure how to refer to the amount of memory it has, particularly considering that the memory is 36-bit and not 8-bit. Wikipedia says it has 64KB; the video says (I quote) "460 K bytes". References: - I waxed philosophical about SketchPad a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13102757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13102757 (article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13097121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13097121) - http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/mit/tx-2/ http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/mit/tx-2/

70 points by ShaneWilton 10y ago

obligatory quote, for those who have not read it before > 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?" > Ivan replied: "Well, I didn't know it was hard."

melling 10y ago

Douglas Englebart's video is another classic video that took place in 1968: https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY Light pen's and chorded keyboards in the 1960's.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

pliptvo 10y ago

More precisely, what's being demoed is Sketchpad III, which improved Sutherland's original 2d Sketchpad with 3d rendering capabilities. And Ivan Sutherland's not in the video.

dang 10y ago
Ok, we updated the title above to reflect that. I confess I thought it was Ivan :(

Animats 10y ago

Sutherland saw, very early, that a constraint system was the way to go. We went through generations of CAD systems and draw programs which didn't do constraints. Even today, most draw programs don't do constraints as well as Sketchpad. Sketch mode in Autodesk Inventor does constraints very well, including difficult geometry problems like circles tangent to other circles. This is a solved problem today, but tends to be solved right only in the better CAD systems. (If only the HTML people had thought in terms of constraints. Left edge of box B is coincident with right edge of box A. Right edge of box B is coincident with right edge of window. Left edge of box A is coincident with left edge of window. Top edge of box A and top edge of box B are collinear. Boxes A and B have equal width. That's the way to get two columns. Unlike CSS layout, this concept can be extended beyond rectangular boxes; constraints with circles and splines are usually solveable.)

jasonkostempski 10y ago
Last time I rewatched this video I tried to start researching the idea of constraints but couldn't find a good starting point. Any recommendations?
- Animats 10y ago
  https://www.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/papers/cmh/Basic2Dconstraints.pdf https://www.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/papers/cmh/Basic2Dconstrain...
melloclello 10y ago
As I remember, an early CSS proposal included the Cassowary constraints solver engine, but they decided not to go with it because either a fast implementation didn't exist at the time, or they were worried users wouldn't find the system intuitive?
- azeirah 10y ago
  I remember that the Cassowary constraint system was implemented in Apple's app development framework, and people reporting that it was hell to work with after building anything beyond minimal complexity. Also, there is an actual GSS implementation by thegrid.io https://gridstylesheets.org/ https://gridstylesheets.org/
  - GuiA 10y ago
    To be fair, the blame isn't on the Cassowary approach, but Xcode's god awful Interface Builder UI.
  - Sidnicious 10y ago
    I've worked with Auto Layout a bit. - The GUI built into Xcode is usable once you learn its quirks (e.g. how to swap the relationship in a constraint so that it doesn't say that the right edge of some button needs to be -5pt from the left edge of the button next to it). - The ObjC/Swift API is bad. - It handles RTL languages excellently: by default, constraints are expressed in terms of leading/trailing edges, but can be literal left/right if you want. - It deals poorly with adding and removing views from a hierarchy: removing a view discards all of its constraints, so you need to have logic to reestablish them. Unfortunately, there are horror stories about performance tanking with an OS update or taking on exponential properties, like this one which lead the team to develop a non-constraint-based layout framework: https://realm.io/news/slug-nick-snyder-layoutkit/ https://realm.io/news/slug-nick-snyder-layoutkit/ It leads me to wonder if unpredictable performance is a limitation of constraint solving… or at least to be cautious with current implementations. Maybe an API that only makes known-fast relationships possible would help.

az123zaz 10y ago

Professor: "We're going to show you a man actually talking to a computer.." Interviewer: "Surely not with his voice."

hotcrossbun 10y ago
The chat with the professor is one of my favourite parts. Paraphrasing.....At the start he may not know what the problem is, but through interaction and response, he and the computer will work it out together. Totally nails interactive design, and what software development is, and yet often still fails to be

i336_ 10y ago

Ah, SketchPad. You put http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html to shame. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TX-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TX-2, the machine SketchPad ran on, had 460KB of 36-bit memory, and it. ran. at. 400kHz - yes - 400k instructions per second. The CAD system that introduced the idea of the GUI, clipboard, OOP, and so many other things, ran only a little faster than the masked-ROM calculators you can buy for a couple dollars at the store down the road nowadays. It's kind of depressing. If you liked the OP video, you must watch https://archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987 https://archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987. It's only 46:29 long. I really, REALLY want the SketchPad program. If I had a bunch of money tucked away I would easily dedicate a decade of my life to trying to track it down. As an aside, I'm not quite sure how to refer to the amount of memory it has, particularly considering that the memory is 36-bit and not 8-bit. Wikipedia says it has 64KB; the video says (I quote) "460 K bytes". References: - I waxed philosophical about SketchPad a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13102757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13102757 (article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13097121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13097121) - http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/mit/tx-2/ http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/mit/tx-2/