Ivan Sutherland Wins Kyoto Prize 44
cstacy writes "The Inamori Foundation has awarded the Kyoto Prize to graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland, for developing Sketchpad in 1963. The award recognizes significant technical, scientific and artistic contributions to the 'betterment of mankind, and honors Sutherland him for nearly 50 years of demonstrating that computer graphics could be used "for both technical and artistic purposes.'"
Sketchpad Video (Score:5, Informative)
Awesome video footage seeing Sketchpad in operation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg [youtube.com]
Wiki article alone doesn't do it justice (Score:5, Informative)
I recommend watching this video of Sketchpad narrated by Alan Kay [youtube.com]. You have to remember this is from 1963. It demonstrated copy and paste, rotation and scaling, a pointer based graphical interface, and more. Pretty damn impressive.
Re:Never too late ??? (Score:3, Informative)
It's a vector graphics program more closely related to Inkpad or even CAD programs than to Paint. It was written in a time where there was no computer graphics, let alone graphical user interfaces, and the output was basically an analogue oscilloscope. And he built a lot of the technology, including a new high-level proto-OOP language, himself in less than a year.
Yeah, but other than that...