thesis at MIT and peripherally related to the Computer-Aided Design project at that time. The Sketchpad program was part and parcel of Sutherland's Ph.D. By 1975, the light pen and the Cathode-ray tube with which it had been used had been removed. The TX-2 was an experimental machine and the hardware changed frequently (on Wednesdays, according to Sutherland ). Of the 36 bits available to store each display spot in the display file, 20 gave the coordinates of that spot for the display system and the remaining 16 gave the address of the n-component element responsible for adding that spot to display. The user drew on the screen with the recently invented light pen. Sketchpad ran on the Lincoln TX-2 (1958) computer at MIT, which had 64k of 36-bit words. The Computer History Museum holds program listings for Sketchpad. Sutherland wrote in his thesis that Bolt, Beranek and Newman had a "similar program" and T-Square was developed by Peter Samson and one or more fellow MIT students in 1962, both for the PDP-1. Hanratty is sometimes called the "father of CAD/CAM" and wrote PRONTO, a numerical control language at General Electric in 1957, and wrote CAD software while working for General Motors beginning in 1961. Very few programs can be called precedents for his achievements. Geometric constraints was another major invention in Sketchpad, letting the user easily constrain geometric properties in the drawing-for instance, the length of a line or the angle between two lines could be fixed.Īs a trade magazine said, clearly Sutherland "broke new ground in 3D computer modeling and visual simulation, the basis for computer graphics and CAD/CAM". If the user changed the master drawing, all the instances would change as well. The main idea was to have master drawings which one could instantiate into many duplicates. The clever way the program organized its geometric data pioneered the use of "master" ("objects") and "occurrences" ("instances") in computing and pointed forward to object oriented programming. Sketchpad was the earliest program ever to utilize a complete graphical user interface. See History of the graphical user interface for a more detailed discussion of GUI development. Sketchpad inspired Douglas Engelbart to design and develop oN-Line System at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) during the 1960s. Sutherland was inspired by the Memex from " As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush. Using the program, Ivan Sutherland showed that computer graphics could be used for both artistic and technical purposes in addition to demonstrating a novel method of human–computer interaction. For example, the graphical user interface (GUI) was derived from Sketchpad as well as modern object-oriented programming. It pioneered human–computer interaction (HCI), and is considered the ancestor of modern computer-aided design (CAD) programs as well as a major breakthrough in the development of computer graphics in general. Robot Draftsman ) is a computer program written by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 in the course of his PhD thesis, for which he received the Turing Award in 1988, and the Kyoto Prize in 2012. Ivan Sutherland demonstrating Sketchpad (UVC via IA: video and thumbnails)
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