mercurious

It took Apple 45 years to even come close to this.

Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad MIT thesis was covered by Create Digital Motion after I posted the video clip from MIT’s New Media Reader featuring Dr. Alay Kay from Xerox PARC give a lecture on Sketchpad. The video clip has since garnered over 10,000 YouTube views and other “instances” of the film on video sharing sites — so appropriate given Sutherland’s contribution of the idea of a “master” and “instances.” His contributions to computer aided design history extend well into its origins and beyond its final outcome.

Peter Kirn says it best — what I think, he was able to say about this…

Additional Demonstration Footage Also Emerged

This Sketchpad film on YouTube: Part 1

The computer has been, in a sense, nothing but a very elaborate calculating machine. But, now we’re making the computer be more like, almost like a “human assistant” and the computer will seem to have some intelligence.

It doesn’t really. Only the intelligence that we put in it.

{Emphasis added.}

Professor Steven Coons
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT
Co-Director of The Computer Aided Design Project