GENESYS: An Interactive Computer-Mediated Animation System

I finally finished reading this dissertation for the first time a few weeks ago. It's astounding that in 1963, on a computer built in 1959, Sutherland wrote a graphical user interface for a constraint-satisfaction-based CAD system with (what Ted Nelson would later dub) transclusion, using object-oriented programming and accelerating his graphics with SIMD arithmetic. (An appendix contains a proposal for a GPU — but it's really just a 2-D accelerator to offload the drawing of lines and circles from the CPU. Five years later, Sutherland wrote a paper on the "Wheel of Reincarnation" about how GPUs tend to become full-fledged CPUs, starting the cycle again.) It won't surprise anyone who read link that the most interesting part to me was the way Sutherland uses memory — he calls out his use of structs (he calls them "blocks" or "n-component elements") as a departure from the tradition of arrays ("tables"), but for me the more interesting part is how his use of them differs from the directed-graph memory model we use almost universally nowadays. (See p.37, "N-component elements", for his introduction to structs.) Rather than simply using single pointers, the participants in each many-to-one relationship are linked together into a doubly-linked list ("ring") with its head ("hen" (!)) in the item on the "one" side of the relationship, and the list nodes ("chickens") in the items on the "many" side. This means you can efficiently traverse the relationships in either direction, which considerably simplifies the implementation of the Observer pattern. Literally every GUI program is based on SKETCHPAD. Sometimes Alan Kay gives Sutherland credit for inventing object-orientation, although Smalltalk and Simula clearly contain some ideas that aren't in SKETCHPAD. If you liked SKETCHPAD you'll probably love GENESYS, which demonstrates Bret Victor’s acting-out-based animation interface on a tablet — on the TX-2 in 1969: ▶ this video

There are also some interesting GUI elements in GENESYS, a parametric image animation program for the TX-2 at MIT, by Ronald M. Baecker (1969) [1,2]. [1] ▶ this video [2] Baecker, Ronald M. (1969). Interactive Computer-Mediated Animation. PhD Thesis, MIT. link Also mind the use of a mouse in another video animation software from around 1970, by Marceli Wein and Nestor Burtnyk, running on a SEL 840A in Canada, three years before a mouse was used at PARC: [3] link