Blast from the GUI past: 50 years after Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad first debuted
Fifty years ago in 1963, Ivan Sutherland first demonstrated Sketchpad, one of the most important contributions to the field of Computer Science. Long before Apple, the Lisa and Xerox's Alto, a constraint-based object-oriented graphical system was developed and demonstrated.
Today's video was pointed out by Charles Choi over on his Notes from /dev/null blog. He writes, "Sometimes you're told something that happened some time ago. You stash that date in the back of your mind only to recall it much later in life, surprised and chagrined at the time that's passed since you last thought of it... Today I recalled Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, arguably the most significant Computer Science Ph.D. thesis ever. I had the fortune in the mid-'90s to watch a rare videocassette recording of Alan Kay describing Sketchpad for a computer graphics course taught by Randy Pausch. Fast-forward to today and the video is only a YouTube search away."
Looking at that video, it's just amazing to think of that kind of tech in 1963.
