EDITOR Jonathan Grudin jgrudin@microsoft.com
almost 20 years pass before we started to realize Bush’s vision? To what extent and how did Bush’s writings influence Engelbart and Nelson? Did Nelson and Engelbart interact and influence one another? What triggered the explosion of research on hypertext in the late ’60s and ’70s that led to the first annual conference in 1987 and the first commercial products? What were the key milestones in the path from there to the Web, regarded by many as the “killer app” of hypertext?
Recent publications document the pioneering interactive computer graphics research at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, including Ivan Sutherland’s influential Sketchpad system in the early ’60s. Sketchpad demonstrated the potential for effective computer-aided sketching and design through innovative concepts including hierarchic internal structure of computer-represented pictures; recursively defined operations on these pictures; master copies and instances; constraints on picture geometry; iconic representations of constraints; and elegant input techniques using a light pen. Yet questions remain. How and to what extent was Sketchpad influenced by early computer graphics projects such as that of Stephen Coons and Douglas Ross at the MIT Electronic Systems Lab? How did these developments inspire and launch the vigorous field of interactive computer graphics?
Sketchpad and other systems developed at Lincoln Lab were direct manipulation systems, satisfying the four criteria posited by Shneiderman in his important 1983 paper: “ 1. continuous representation of the object of interest; 2. physical actions … instead of complex [typed] syntax; 3.
rapid, incremental, reversible operations whose impact … is immediately visible; and 4. layered or spiral approach to learning.” Yet this paper cites no work earlier than the late ’70s, so the intellectual history of direct manipulation has yet to be written. The concepts were also present in early videogames such as Spacewar—developed at MIT in 1961-1962—in early computer-aided design programs, and in the pioneering computer-aided molecular-chemistry work of Cyrus Levinthal at MIT. Why did it take two decades to abstract this interaction style as a new paradigm?
Related concepts are that of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the Windows Icons Menus Pointers (WIMP) style of interaction. In introducing a CHI 2005 panel on early work at Lincoln, Bill Buxton stated “it is hard to imagine the innovation that happened at Xerox PARC in the ’70s having been possible without the foundation that Lincoln Labs provided.” I believe this is true, but the case needs to be made.
Did the work at Lincoln Lab inspire the development of what arguably was the first personal computer, the Alto, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)? If so, how? Are there direct links between interactive graphics at Lincoln on calligraphic displays and the Alto bit-mapped display? The same question can be asked of the development, also at PARC, of Dick Shoup’s Superpaint color frame buffer. How did these lead to Xerox’s late and unsuccessful attempt to commercialize personal computing in the Star system, which influenced the design of the Apple Lisa, the predecessor of the Macintosh? Where are the earliest manifestations of each key component—bit-
References:
Archives