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. 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. Sketchpad proved to be a hit when Sutherland displayed it at MIT's Joint Computer Conference in the spring of 1963. Flipping a variety of toggle switches on console enabled the operator to give direct instructions to the computer concerning the size and ratio of each drawn line.įollowing suggestions from members of his thesis committee, Sutherland's final version of the program incorporated the concepts of plex-programming, an early form of real-time programming, and Bootstrap Picture Language to make drawn images responsive. In less than a year Sutherland had a working version of the program he called "Sketchpad." This first version enabled the operator to use the light pen to draw vertical and horizontal lines on the CRT. And critically, for Sutherland's purposes, it also featured a 7-inch cathode ray tube display and a light pen for interacting with the display. Besides filling a large room, it had 320 kilobytes (KB) of memory, twice the capacity of the largest commercial machines then on the market. It was also one of the largest and most powerful computers in the world. The TX-2, one of the first-generation electronic digital computers in which transistors replaced vacuum tubes, was specifically designed to aid in the effort to enhance the study of real-time human-computer interaction. Clark quickly agreed and offered the school's more powerful experimental computer, the TX-2, which Clark had built in 1958. Sutherland approached his advisor, Wes Clark with the idea of writing such a program as part of his thesis.
Until this time, engineers and architects had drawn their designs by hand, a painstaking and arduous process. One day, while working with a relatively new MIT invention, the Light Pen, to plot points on the TX-0's cathode ray tube ("CRT") display, Sutherland hit upon the idea of using computers to draw. Sutherland was an intern at Lincoln Labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he worked on the TX-0, a computer optimized for researching human-computer interaction. This was especially true in 1963 when PhD candidate Ivan Sutherland utilized a number of existing technologies to launch a new era in human-computer interaction with the creation of Sketchpad, the world's first interactive computer graphics program. Sir Isaac Newton's dictum about "standing on the shoulders of giants" applies across every field of human endeavor as curious and determined individuals tinker with existing inventions and concepts to create something new and better.
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