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THE VIDEO SHELF · computing history

Sketchpad, by Dr. Ivan Sutherland with comments by Alan Kay

Earliest known footage of Ivan Sutherland's MIT PhD work, Sketchpad, the first computer graphics system, with commentary by Alan Kay. It shows light-pen drawing with constraints in a short clip.

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Why HN readers recommended it

HN points people to it as the canonical demo of early interactive graphics, constraints and objects, and as one of Alan Kay's favorite things to show.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
David Carroll
Topic
computing history
Format
demo
Level
general
HN recommenders in dataset
3
HN mentions in dataset
8
Recommendation years in dataset
2013–2024

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • Related to the visual simulations, one of Alan Kay's favorite demos over the years has been to show folks Sketchpad, [VIDEO] partly as a "this is what we were doing in 1962, you are now as far removed from that demo as that demo was …

    crdrost on Hacker News · 2024-07
    In Defense of Lisp macros: The automotive field as a case in point

  • So good. It never ceases to amaze me what could be done in such constrained systems (I guess it'll always look like that in retrospect). For anyone who has never seen it, Sketchpad, from the 60s: [LINK] Edit: With commentary from Alan Kay! [VIDEO]

    aidos on Hacker News · 2016-02
    In Programming computer animation in 1964 [video]

  • For "how things work", I recommend the book Code by Charles Petzold. After that, Jon Stokes's Inside the Machine will give a lot of details on CPU architectures up to Intel's Core 2 Duo. You can also try following along a computer engineering book if …

    Jach on Hacker News · 2022-04
    In Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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