Sketchpad (aka Robot Draftsman) was a revolutionary computer program written by
Ivan SutherlandIvan Edward Sutherland is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers.-Biography:Sutherland earned his...
in 1963 in the course of his PhD thesis, for which he received the
Turing AwardThe A. M. Turing Award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field"...
in 1988. It helped change the way people interact with
computerA computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a set of instructions.Although mechanical examples of computers have existed through much of recorded human history, the first electronic computers were developed in the mid-20th century . These were the size of a large room, consuming as...
s. Sketchpad is considered to be the ancestor of modern computer-aided drafting (CAD) programs as well as a major breakthrough in the development of
computer graphicsComputer graphics are graphics created using computers and, more generally, the representation and manipulation of pictorial data by a computer....
in general. For example, the Graphic User Interface was derived from the Sketchpad as well as modern object oriented programming.
Sketchpad (aka Robot Draftsman) was a revolutionary computer program written by
Ivan SutherlandIvan Edward Sutherland is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers.-Biography:Sutherland earned his...
in 1963 in the course of his PhD thesis, for which he received the
Turing AwardThe A. M. Turing Award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field"...
in 1988. It helped change the way people interact with
computerA computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a set of instructions.Although mechanical examples of computers have existed through much of recorded human history, the first electronic computers were developed in the mid-20th century . These were the size of a large room, consuming as...
s. Sketchpad is considered to be the ancestor of modern computer-aided drafting (CAD) programs as well as a major breakthrough in the development of
computer graphicsComputer graphics are graphics created using computers and, more generally, the representation and manipulation of pictorial data by a computer....
in general. For example, the Graphic User Interface was derived from the Sketchpad as well as modern object oriented programming. Ivan Sutherland demonstrated with it that computer graphics could be used for both
artisticComputer art is any art in which computers played a role in production or display of the artwork. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, videogame, web site, algorithm, performance or gallery installation...
and technical purposes in addition to showing a novel method of human-computer interaction.
Sutherland was inspired by the
MemexThe memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the theoretical proto-hypertext computer system he proposed in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think...
from '
As We May ThinkAs We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945. Bush argued that as humans stopped warring, scientific efforts should change from increasing physical abilities to making all previous collected human knowledge more accessible.The article was a...
' by
Vannevar BushVannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm-viewer which is somewhat analogous to the World Wide Web.Bush was a well-known...
. Sketchpad inspired
Douglas EngelbartDr. Douglas C. Engelbart is an American inventor and early computer pioneer. He is best known for inventing the computer mouse, as a pioneer of human-computer interaction whose team developed hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs; and as a committed and vocal proponent of the...
to design and develop
oN-Line SystemNLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system designed by Douglas Engelbart and the researchers at the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute during the 1960s...
at the
Augmentation Research CenterStanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center was founded by electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart to develop and experiment with new tools and techniques for collaboration and information processing. The main product to come out of ARC was the revolutionary oN-Line System, better...
(ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) during the 1960s.
Sketchpad was the first program ever to utilize a complete
graphical user interfaceA graphical user interface is a type of user interface item that allows people to interact with programs in more ways than typing such as computers; hand-held devices such as MP3 Players, Portable Media Players or Gaming devices; household appliances and office equipment with images rather than...
, using an x-y point plotter display and the recently invented
light penA light pen is a computer input device in the form of a light-sensitive wand used in conjunction with a computer's CRT TV set or monitor. It allows the user to point to displayed objects, or draw on the screen, in a similar way to a touch screen but with greater positional accuracy...
. The clever way the program organized its
geometricGeometry arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. Geometry was one of the two fields of pre-modern mathematics, the other being the study of numbers....
data pioneered the use of "objects" and "instances" in computing and pointed forward to object oriented programming. The main idea was to have master drawings which one could instantiate into many duplicates. If the user changed the master drawing, all the instances would change as well. Another major invention in Sketchpad was that it let the user easily constrain geometric properties in the drawing—for instance, the length of a line or the angle between two lines could be fixed. Sketchpad ran on the Lincoln TX-2 (1958) computer at
MITThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research...
, which had 64k of 36 bit-words. Of the 36 bits available to store each display spot in the display file, 20 gave the coordinates of that spot for the display system and the remaining 16 gave the address of the n-component element responsible for adding that spot to display.
Bolt, Beranek and NewmanBBN Technologies is a high-technology company which provides research and development services. BBN is based next to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA...
had a "similar program" and
T-SquareT-Square was an early drafting program written by Peter Samson assisted by Alan Kotok and possibly Robert A. Saunders while they were students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and members of the Tech Model Railroad Club....
was developed by
Peter SamsonPeter R. Samson is an American computer scientist, best known for creating pioneering computer software....
and one or more fellow MIT students in 1962, both for the
PDP-1The PDP-1 was the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1960. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture, at MIT, BBN and elsewhere...
.
In 1963 most computers ran jobs in batch job mode only, using
punch cardA punch card or punched card , is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions...
s or
magnetic tapeMagnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording generally consisting of a thin magnetizable coating on a long and narrow strip of plastic. Nearly all recording tape is of this type, whether used for recording audio or video or for computer data storage. It was originally developed in Germany,...
reels submitted by professional programmers or
engineeringEngineering is the discipline, art and profession of acquiring and applying technical, scientific and mathematical knowledge to design and implement materials, structures, machines, devices, systems, and processes that safely realize a desired objective or inventions.The American Engineers' Council...
students. A considerable amount of work was required to make the TX-2 operate in interactive mode with a large
CRTThe cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun and a fluorescent screen, with internal or external means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam, used to create images in the form of light emitted from the fluorescent screen...
screen. When Sutherland had finished with it, it had to be reconverted to run in batch mode again. This involved some major
hardwareHardware is a general term for the physical artifacts of a technology. It may also mean the physical components of a computer system, in the form of computer hardware....
reconstruction as well as software work.
The Sketchpad program was part and parcel of Sutherland's
Ph.D.Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated PhD , for the Latin , meaning "teacher of philosophy", or alternatively, DPhil, for the equivalent , is an advanced academic degree awarded by universities...
thesis at MIT. It was reprinted in 1980 under the title
Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. It is now out of print but several university libraries have copies and it is also present on the rare book market. A new was published in 2003.