Notes: SKETCH PAD

SKETCHPAD - A MAN-MACHINE GRAPHICAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEM
By Ivan E. Sutherland, 1963

The following notes may sometimes be very immature. They are just some intuitions thoughts emerged in my brain when I was reading the article.

When I realized this Pad is so similar to iPad, I googled it and I found out that this is a famous paper in history for which the author won the Turing Prize of 1988. Obviously, the author deserves this honor. This approach of human-computer interaction is unprecedented.

I think the light pen and the button system is its best highlight. We will no longer need to press the direction buttons again and again for a million times to coordinate a simple point. What we need to do now is just select it directly and then stretch it to the right place. That fits the idea I mentioned above in the thinking of AS WE MAY THINK - keep things nice and simple. Nowadays, we replaced the light pen with our fingers, and the physical buttons with virtual buttons on screens and there comes iPad. I can’t help thinking that what is gonna replace the fingers and virtual buttons? Because buttons are so annoying that we can easily make mistakes on pressing them. I believe that buttons will disappear in the future. But I haven’t figured out what’s gonna replace them.

The constraints remind me of my major, software engineering. This is a subject about figuring out how to manage a software developing process through a more controllable way instead of a casual way that everyone is doing things based on their own preferences. The similarity between these two things is that they are both pursuing perfect constraints for an uncertain thing. The former is for drawing while the latter is for software developing. One important thing in SE is that we need to predict the rate of the progress and the current developing velocity, which inspired me to think what if the machine can try to predict what we wanna do in a drawing? Maybe we can develop a system to predict this in the future.

Although the thoughts of the sketch pad are amazing and advancing. The principles of programming implementations are just basic things. And it taught me that solid theoretic basis is very important in scientific research.