SKETCHPAD A MAN-MACHINE GRAPHICAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEM
The first interactive computer-graphics program. Written by Ivan Edward Sutherland for his MIT PhD thesis, submitted January 1963 under Claude Shannon, with Marvin Minsky and Steven Coons on the committee. Ran on the TX-2 at MIT Lincoln Laboratory — a transistor-driven research machine with 64K of 36-bit words, a seven-inch CRT, a light pen, and a thirty-seven-button button box.
Three demonstrations live in this room. CANVAS is the constraint editor — draw lines with the light pen, then make them horizontal, perpendicular, equal-length. NEFERTITE is the recursive sub-picture demo — one face, two eye instances that cycle through master variants, the ancestor of every symbol library since. TRUSS is the load demo — a parametric bridge that flexes when weight is applied, the seed of every CAD physics engine.
Sutherland's thesis built five new things into one program: a ring data structure for topology, recursive sub-pictures (instances), a constraint satisfaction system, the light pen tracking algorithm, and the idea that a person could draw with a computer rather than describe to it. Every interactive design tool since traces back to this room.
CART 010A · CLASSICERY · GENRE 8-BIT · SKETCHPAD 1963
Implemented in HTML/Canvas, no build step, no dependencies beyond Google Fonts.
Light pen ≈ mouse. Button box ≈ side panels. The phosphor is a CSS approximation.
No code, screenshots, or assets are reproduced from Lincoln Lab or any successor.
Vector strokes drawn fresh in JS. Constraint solver written from the thesis description.