Sketchpad software software#

Sketchpad ran on the Lincoln TX-2 (1958) computer at MIT, which had 64k of 36-bit words. The Computer History Museum holds program listings for Sketchpad. Sutherland wrote in his thesis that Bolt, Beranek and Newman had a 'similar program' and T-Square was developed by Peter Samson and one or more fellow MIT students in 1962, both for the PDP-1.

Sketchpad software software#

Hanratty is sometimes called the 'father of CAD/CAM' and wrote PRONTO, a numerical control language at General Electric in 1957, and wrote CAD software while working for General Motors beginning in 1961. Very few programs can be called precedents for his achievements.

Geometric constraints was another major invention in Sketchpad, letting 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.ДЄs a trade magazine said, clearly Sutherland 'broke new ground in 3D computer modeling and visual simulation, the basis for computer graphics and CAD/CAM'. If the user changed the master drawing, all the instances would change as well. The main idea was to have master drawings which one could instantiate into many duplicates. The clever way the program organized its geometric data pioneered the use of 'master' ('objects') and 'occurrences' ('instances') in computing and pointed forward to object oriented programming. Sketchpad was the first program ever to utilize a complete graphical user interface. Sketchpad inspired Douglas Engelbart to design and develop oN-Line System at the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) during the 1960s. Sutherland was inspired by the Memex from ' As We May Think' by Vannevar Bush.