Grail Demo from CHM tape

Yoshiki Ohshima (大島芳樹)
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2019–2024
YouTube
13K views · 7 years ago · demo · intermediate · historical

A restored demo of Grail, a 1960s RAND system in which people draw flowcharts with a stylus on a tablet and the computer recognizes and runs them. The footage comes from a Computer History Museum tape and was posted by Yoshiki Ohshima.

HN people hold it up as proof that early computer pioneers were decades ahead, an ancestor of today's visual programming and tools for thought.

“Early computer folks were visionaries, they did plenty of stuff and ideas, that we are still slowly catching up to.”
HCI pioneers & visionary demosTools for thought & programming UX
#grail#randtablet#visualprogramming#peninput#1968

9 comments from Hacker News

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@pjmlp2024 · in “Interview with Dr. Ken Iverson (1982)”
Early computer folks were visionaries, they did plenty of stuff and ideas, that we are still slowly catching up to. Imagine being able to do this on a random tablet (from ), ▶ this video The best we got is something like this, link
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@fagnerbrack2024 · in “Visual Programming in the 60s [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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@thunderbong2024 · in “Grail Demo from Computer History Museum Archive [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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@pjmlp2024 · in “Grail Demo from Computer History Museum (1968)”
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@gjvc2021 · in “Grail Demo 1968 from Computer History Museum Tape [YouTube]”
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@AriaMinaei2019 · in “Grail Demo from CHM Tape: Visual programming in the 1960s [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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@pjmlp2024 · in “A return to hand-written notes by learning to read and write”
Naturally the idea is to explore new concepts a mix of diagrams and coding, Basically what Brett Victor in recent times, and others have been trying to do for decades, "Grail on Rand Tablet from 1968 demo" ▶ this video Or "Programmable Ink" at Strange Loop 2022, link There used to exist a graphical based Lisp for iPad, Lisping, unfortunely the app is long gone as it wasn't kept up to date with the OS. Here is on old thread discussing it, link The new iPad Calculator, is a more recent example of such ideas.
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@tmtvl2023 · in “Emacs Is Not Enough”
Do you think managing CL packages in a way similar to 1968's Grail (▶ this video) could work? I'm thinking of a visual overview of packages were a user can connect packages together (maybe by drawing lines or by holding a key down and clicking on packages to link them), and can afterwards click on the vertices connecting the nodes to configure which symbols get imported. It might be a bit UML-ish, but that's probably because I spent a bit too much time playing around with Umbrello.
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@tmtvl2023 · in “Architecture diagrams should be code”
This somewhat reminds me of a demo from a couple of years ago: ▶ this video It's a system called Grail, which allows for its users to draw flowcharts and attach logic to the various elements.
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