Sketchpad – A Man-Machine Graphical Information System

Collection of the Computer History Museum. This lecture was recorded on March 22, 1994. 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. Catalog number: 102639871