Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad Demo

Before the mouse or the desktop window, there was a graduate student drawing straight onto a screen with a light pen. Ivan Sutherland built Sketchpad on MIT Lincoln Laboratory's TX-2 computer for his 1963 PhD thesis, and this footage shows ideas that now feel too obvious to have been invented: rubber-band lines, zooming, and shapes that can be recalled, rotated, rescaled and moved. Nothing like it existed before, which is why computer graphics and computer-aided design both trace back to it. It makes a short, striking opener before the Engelbart demo, which pushes the same idea of working with a computer through pictures rather than punched cards.