A few days ago I came across a Wikipedia article on Sketchpad. Written by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 as part of a PhD thesis, it was a program that allowed the user to use a light pen to interact with a computer in order to draw lines and circles. Even more ingenuously, you could join together these "instances" of figures to create a bounded two-dimensional shape and then strictly define their positions and dimensions. In other words, for that time, it was amazing.
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| Photo from resumbrae.com |
I'm almost tempted to omit that phrase, "for that time." See, last semester I took a class titled SciTech, for part of which we used the drafting program SolidWorks. Not only is the application the best of its type I have ever used, but as I was reading Sutherland's thesis, Sketchpad seemed curiously similar to it, despite the fact that it was not 3D.
In fact, I would say it's almost the same program.
That doesn't mean that SolidWorks plagiarized Sketchpad, though, I am sure, it was very heavily influenced, but I'm just surprised either that programming geniuses of today are not able to come up with a substantial improvement in the user interface ( in which case Sketchpad would be left behind ) or that such inventions could be made in one huge step in 1963 that there's nothing left to do. I guess I'll never know which.
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