Time for action – meeting Ivan Sutherland and Sketchpad

The video Ivan Sutherland : Sketchpad Demo is not an animation. It's a look at the interactive computer graphics program that was the prototype for all others, including Blender, and it gives you an idea of what primitive computer graphics were like. Follow these steps to watch the video and observe the variety of graphics that are being produced. While they may not look like modern animation, they have the same fundamental elements.

1. Search on the Web for the terms Ivan Sutherland + Sketchpad Demo (2/2). YouTube, archive.org, or some other site should have the video.
2. Watch it now. This is the beginning of modern computer graphics.
3. What kind of graphics do you see? What kind of 3D animation is it doing?
4. What kind of input devices do they have?
5. They spoke about master drawings and instances of these drawings and the data structures that make them. Does this have anything to do with modern computer graphics?
6. They showed the Lincoln Labs TX-2 computer used by Ivan Sutherland. What do you think would win in a computing power contest, the TX-2 or your mobile phone?

What just happened?

We just saw the grandfather of all computer animation programs. Similar to early ink animations, it was all done with lines. They had the basic 3D transformations so they could rotate objects and display a quad view similar to the Quad View in Blender, but there was no shading. You probably noticed there was no standard keyboard or mouse, but there was a box with buttons, switches on the computer, and a lightpen that they used. The lightpen was a distant ancestor of a tablet or a touchscreen. The data structures were very important. Blender definitely uses versions of the master drawings and instances, as you will discover. And yes, your cell phone has much more computing power than the TX-2.

Going to the late 1970s, a few companies are doing 3D animation

By the late 1970s, a few companies are experimenting with video- and film-quality computer animation. One of the first was a company called Information International, Inc. or Triple I. At that time, they were doing some of the best animation in the world, which led to them being one of the teams that made the original Tron. Looking back, what is amazing is how simple the graphics are.