Ivan Sutherland Sketchpad Demo 1963

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 you want to go that low in detail with exercises, Digital Fundamentals by Floyd is a common textbook (I have an old 8th edition). History-wise, enjoy learning slowly because there's so much that even if you dedicated yourself to it you wouldn't be "done" any time soon! Some suggestions in order though: Watching The Mother of All Demos: link A short clip of Sketchpad presented by Alan Kay: ▶ this video An article from the 40s that also inspired Engelbart: link The Information by James Gleick What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg Lastly, to mix up in whatever order you please, some paper collections: Object-Oriented Programming: The CLOS Perspective edited by Andreas Paepcke History of Programming Languages papers for various langs you're interested in, here's the set from the second conference in 1993 link but there have been further conferences to check out too if it's interesting Also all of the Turing Award winners' lectures I've read have been good link All that and some good recommendations others have given should keep you busy for a while!

Demo of Ivan Sutherland's 1963 Sketchpad: ▶ this video It was a drawing app with the following features: Snap to object ("This allows me to be sloppy while I'm drawing and get a precision drawing at the same time"), connected vectors, arcs, alignment with other objects, copying, multiple "files," scaling ("It scales approximately 2 miles in size"), 3D, etc etc It blows me away that this kind of UI was even conceived in the 1960s. It feels like there was a dark ages middle period after then until quite recently.

TL;DR: If you share the sentiment of the parent commentator you may find this wall of text interesting. You might be interested in Alan Kay's "Doing with Images Makes Symbols Pt 1", link (46:29). This video features excerpts from Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad demo (link 10:34; ▶ this video 19:19) and Douglas Englebart's seminal demonstration (link 34:45). I recommend watching all the videos in full to get a proper sense of context (Alan Kay's excerpts from Douglas's demonstration particularly don't include the bits that explain how the workstation's camera system works, which is important; also, the right audio channel in the Alan Kay video unfortunately seems to be dead, while the other videos are much better). Highlights from Alan Kay's video include (in hi..low precedence) info about the Sketchpad's CPU, which you might want to listen to twice so you don't mishear (8:58), some really depressing acknowledgements (from Alan Kay himself) that Sketchpad was a never-reproduced gem even in the 80s (8:33), Ivan's (quoted) remarks on the features of the Sketchpad system (7:58), and acknowledgement about the lack of ease of use of light pens (7:12). I consider the above videos to be my own personal pinnacle, what I look up to when I think about good computer design. Some may find them depressing for the reasons you've outlined. It's sad that this obscure niche of computing doesn't lend itself to being very actionable in this day and age. There's definitely no comparison in the mainstream today, and nowhere you can wedge yourself in sideways and find yourself working on problems of a similar caliber. The short answer to what happened might be that there came a point at which enough people started asking for fast answers that all the technicians collectively stopped tinkering and switched to specializing in finding the quickest solutions to problems. Here is a fuller theory as to why everything's worked out the way it has, predicated on the idea that this problem is fundamentally human and social. We're wanderers, so to counter that we have a fundamental, innate compulsion to focus on things and study them until the act of studying and exploring becomes mentally and physically difficult and impossible. This scales terribly, producing collectives of groups that have studied subjects so deeply that they reach a kind of "critical mass" and become difficult to communicate with (which inhibits the flow of ideas), and go from making headline-making leaps and bounds that keep their research in the collective conscious, to making inconsistent and halting progress that's infrequent enough to be boring, and on top of that is hard to relate to without an understanding of the group's iterative history of failure and success. This gives way to a kind of inbreeding, which further impedes the free flow of new and/or novel ideas. Unfortunately, computers are still entirely human-driven (in terms of identifying and translating desires to goals) and only do what we tell them to (which isn't surprising, since we did build them for that, they are just tools in the end), and so their effectiveness is only as great as our ability to mentally model them and translate what we want them to do into binary. This is ridiculously hard because our brains are innately vertical (in terms of conceptual isolation, interconnection of similar domains - as well as rapidly-shrinking attention spans, a concerning incidental observation), and it is very, very hard for us to be horizontal - to take in "the bigger picture" of an entire domain in the hopes of producing an effective solution. This is especially the case today. I think the cutting edge of computer architecture reached the point where we couldn't fit the designs in our heads around '75-80 (because we got so good at designing

The first demonstrator here is Timothy E. Johnson, not Ivan Sutherland. Johnson did the "Sketchpad III" work extending Sketchpad into 3D which is demonstrated from 11:30 ▶ this video . Then Larry Roberts appears to demonstrate his own work on hidden-line removal, which is shown from 14:42 ▶ this video . See link for more video, including appearances by Sutherland himself. link is an active effort to get Sketchpad running again on a new TX-2 emulator.

John Von Neumann famously questioned the value of compilers. Eventually we get the keyboard kids that have dominated computing since the early 70's in some form or another whether in a forward thinking way like Dan Ingalls or in an idealic way like the gcc/Free Software crowd. In parallel to this you have people like Laurel, Sutherland, Nelson who live in lateral thinking land. The real issue is that we've been in-store for a big paradigm shift in how we interact with computers for decades at this point. SketchPad let us do competent, constraints based mathematics with images. Video games and the Logo language demonstrate the potential for programming using, "kinetics." In the future we won't code with symbols we'll dance our intent into and through the machine. ▶ this video link link

I don't know if it's selection/survivor bias, but every time I watch a video about computers from the 60s and 70s, I am amazed how spot on they are with the trajectory of the technology. Take this CAD demo from MIT back in 1963 showing features that I commonly use today: ▶ this video Then the 80s and 90s rolled in, the concept is computers that entered the mainstream. Imagination got too wild with movies like Electric Dreams (1984). Videos like this make me think that our predictions of AI super intelligence are probably pretty accurate. But just like this machine, in actuality it may look different.

Related to the visual simulations, one of Alan Kay's favorite demos over the years has been to show folks Sketchpad, ▶ this 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 removed from the year 1900 -- do you really feel like you've made the analogous/concomitant progress in programming?" ... and one of his points there was that a lot of programming acts as a "pop music" where you are trying to replicate the latest new sounds and marginally iterate on those, rather than study the classics and the greats and the legacy of awesome things that had been done in the past.