alt Hacker NewsSutherland figured out how graphic interaction ought to work, with the computer recognizing near points and connecting them. What we now call "snap". He had the key idea of CAD - you can draw with more accuracy if the computer helps.
That demo is running on the MIT TX-0, a transistorized version of Whirlwind and the predecessor of the PDP-1. It was somewhat obsolete at that point, so projects like this could get time on it.
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dependency_2x • today at 9:36 AM
He brushes over the zoom out, which I think was pretty impressive for a computer of this time. There is a lot of redrawing/recalculating going on there. Would be impressive on a 80s microcomputer.
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Sutherland started programming on the TX-0, which was widely accessible on the MIT campus, but Sketchpad was definitely done on the big gun, the TX-2, which was still inside Lincoln Laboratories. (Sutherland's uncle-in-law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Getting helped get him into Lincoln Labs. See https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273819... .) There's an active TX-2 emulation project at the moment https://tx-2.github.io/ , which has the primary goal of getting Sketchpad running.