Artifact Details

Title

Sketchpad – A Man-Machine Graphical Information System

Catalog Number

102639871

Type

Moving Image

Description

Speaker Ivan Sutherland begins his talk describing the visit he and his brother made to see Claude Shannon in 1951, and his early experiences with the Simon electronic kit computer. Sutherland describes the TX-2, MIT’s Transistor eXperiment number 2, on which he wrote Sketchpad, his early graphics system. He gives a detailed accounting of the light pen used to interact with TX-2, including both hardware and software considerations. Sketchpad’s capabilities are discussed in detail, with specific attention to the methods used for creating various elements such as lines, circles, and shapes, and showing projections of various drawings from the mid-1960s. Sutherland then shows an extended film of Sketchpad running on TX-2, followed by an extended question and answer session with the audience.

Date

1994-03-22

Participants

Sutherland, Ivan E., Speaker

Publisher

Sun Microsystems

Place of Publication

US

Format

VHS

Category

Lecture

Series Title

Bay Area Computer History Perspectives