Reading #4: Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System (1963)

by Ivan E. Sutherland (paper)

Comments: Jonathan

This paper presents the initial sketch-based interaction work of Ivan Sutherland. This was one of the first systems to use a pen to draw on a screen, ushering in a new form of human-computer interaction.

To use the system, the user has a set of buttons and switches to activate certain modes and tools, such as a line tool or a delete mode. When the desired settings are set, interaction using the pen accomplishes the desired task. It is important to note that the pen does not perform any free-form drawings, but rather creates geometry using only pre-defined tools or performs commands using pointing or dragging. This makes it more like a CAD system that uses a pen for input (note that the mouse did not exist at the time of this work).

The paper shows its age by emphasizing things like the data structures and memory usage as well as generic representations of sketch elements. A "light pen" is used as the input device.

Most of the paper details the various constraints and tools and how they were implemented using non-procedural object oriented methods, all of which were new ideas (as discussed in this video).

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This paper introduced many new ideas about human-computer interaction, graphical displays, and programming. It was the first of its kind in almost every aspect. It is hard to appreciate it now without reading comments from many years ago. Much of the paper seems trivial to implement using our current software development languages and tools. I found it interesting that many ideas were introduced back in 1962 that are still active, and hard, research problems today (such as recognizing artistic drawings and electrical schematics).

1 comments of glory:

Danielle said...

I thought it was interesting how Sutherland had to create his own collection of lines formed to create letters and numbers on the display. The thought of doing something like that today sounds frustrating. I guess that shows how spoiled we are :)

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