Peerside

I stumbled upon this early 1960s interview with Ivan Sutherland about the invention of the revolutionary Sketchpad system.

The video is actually quite humbling ( for techies at least ) when you consider the number of groundbreaking concepts and boundaries his team pushed at the time - object orientated systems, graphical UIs, light pens, interactive problem solving etc. 

For me the most interesting part of the interview is the prelude where Ivan outlines why the Sketchpad system is so revolutionary - particularly because it's a nirvana we still strive for - the day we can lean on a computer to not only find but solve problems we didn't even know existed. I particularly like his vision of a incremental feedback and interaction between the user and software program - something I believe we'll need more and more of to cope with the wave of data we're experiencing today.

Remember this is all 1963 - over 40 years ago ! 

"You will see a designer solve a problem step by step and he will not at the outset know precisely what his problem is nor will he know exactly how to solve it and little by little he will begin to investigate ideas and the computer and he will be in cooperation, in the fullest of cooperation, in this work.

The conventional way, the old way, of solving problems with a computer has been to understand the problem very,very, well indeed and moreover to know at the very outset to understand what steps have been required to solve the problem - so the computer has been nothing more than a very elaborate calculating machine. But now we're making the computer be more like a human assistant and the computer will seem to have some intelligence, it doesn't really - only the intelligence that we put in it - but it will seem to have intelligence."