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SKETCHPAD

                                             April 07, 2022

Ivan Sutherland, working for three hours a night
on a remarkably primitive football field scale
"supercomputer" in the early 60s, wrote some         A demo is online:
superb mechanical design software we would now       youtu.be/5RyU5OqbvzQ
call CAD, which he named "SketchPad":

    This software had features I was looking for (in vain) in
    the commercially available CAD software that was around
    circa 1980, when I was working as a mechanical engineer.

    You could sketch something roughly, then add "constraints"
    that would firm up the design, making edges parallel or
    perpendicular, and so on.

    You could create standard components
    that could be modified just once       (We would call "objects"
    to revise all of them.                 these days, thanks to Alan
                                           Kay, much to his chagrin.)


    You could apply "contraints" that would do mechanical
    simulations, e.g. you could model a trellis with the
    springiness of members added as a constraint, and apply
    a load to the trellis as yet another constraint and
    watch it flex under load.

            The fact that I hadn't heard about this until I saw a
            recent Alan Kay talk featuring it is amazing-- much
            of what Alan Kay talks about I'm already somewhat
            familiar with, e.g. Douglas Englebart's writings on
            intelligence augmentation, but this I hadn't heard
            about at all.

                                               GOTO_ALAN_KAY


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