At 5:38 he describes "gravity fields" that snap your cursor to lines and endpoints - letting you "be sloppy while drawing and get a precision drawing at the same time."
Every design tool today (Figma, Illustrator, CAD) still uses this exact UX pattern. Sutherland nailed it 62 years ago with a light pen and an oscilloscope.
Super excited about this kind of stuff. Sutherland, mother of all demos, Bret Victor, live fish, etc.
However, going this route for real likely means multi-decade research and iteration.
Demos are quick to make. Generalizing and turning it into real reliable software seems tremendously hard, and beyond just a shift in mindset.
Fortunatelly, we now have vibe coding, so anyone can experience first-hand the frustration of trying to just shift your mindset and immediately reaching a metric ton of limitations in the very first iterations. It's a humbling experience that I recommend to anyone (go ahead and change the world with precision UI, just try it).
Sutherland figured out how graphic interaction ought to work, with the computer recognizing near points and connecting them. What we now call "snap". He had the key idea of CAD - you can draw with more accuracy if the computer helps.
That demo is running on the MIT TX-0, a transistorized version of Whirlwind and the predecessor of the PDP-1. It was somewhat obsolete at that point, so projects like this could get time on it.
He brushes over the zoom out, which I think was pretty impressive for a computer of this time. There is a lot of redrawing/recalculating going on there. Would be impressive on a 80s microcomputer.
Every design tool today (Figma, Illustrator, CAD) still uses this exact UX pattern. Sutherland nailed it 62 years ago with a light pen and an oscilloscope.
reply