PERSON
Ivan Sutherland
The computer scientist who taught machines to answer—inventor of Sketchpad, the head-mounted display, and the principle of direct manipulation—whose 1963 dissertation and 1965 essay described the human-machine relationship that artificial intelligence is still, sixty years later, struggling to realize.
In 1963 a graduate student named Ivan Sutherland sat at the TX-2 computer at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, picked up a light pen, and touched the screen. The screen answered. Lines snapped to grid; corners obeyed constraints; a drawing became, for the first time, a thing the machine understood rather than merely displayed. He called the program Sketchpad, and it contained, in embryo, nearly everything that matters about how human beings meet machines: the idea of a shared workspace both parties can touch, the concept of
augmenting the human rather than replacing them, and the principle that you can govern a complex system not by dictating its every step but by declaring the conditions its output must satisfy and letting it search for a solution. Two years later, in an essay called “The Ultimate Display,” Sutherland described a screen that was not a window onto a world but a door into one—a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland